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News and Views from the Global SouthFri, 13 Sep 2019 21:17:01 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.10A New World? Are the Americas Returning to Old Problems?http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/09/new-world-americas-returning-old-problems/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=new-world-americas-returning-old-problems
http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/09/new-world-americas-returning-old-problems/#respondThu, 12 Sep 2019 17:41:38 +0000Jan Lundiushttp://www.ipsnews.net/?p=163247When I in 1980 first arrived in America it was a new world to me. I went from New York to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and like so many visitors and migrants before me I was overwhelmed by both familiar and strange impressions. Familiar due to books I had read and movies I […]

When I in 1980 first arrived in America it was a new world to me. I went from New York to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and like so many visitors and migrants before me I was overwhelmed by both familiar and strange impressions. Familiar due to books I had read and movies I had seen, strange since I encountered unexpected things and new because both I and several of those I met compared themselves to the “old world”, i.e. Euroasia and parts of Africa.

A sense of uniqueness, admiration for an assumed freshness and difference, can be discerned in the writing of several American writers. Particularly during the 19th century we encounter ideas about wide horizons and an urge to experience and subdue what was assumed to be a wilderness with hidden riches and alluring possibilities. A “Wild West” epitomized in Horace Greeley´s 1865 phrase “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.” An abundance of examples of exuberant feelings may be found in Walt Whitman´s poetry:

All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, a varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the
march,
Pioneers! O pioneers! 1

In the southern hemisphere, Walt Whitman has his equivalent in Pablo Neruda, who in a poem likened ”his” continent to a beloved woman:

When I look at the shape of America on the map,
my love, it is you I see:
the heights of copper on your head, your slender waist,
with throbbing rivers, sweet hills and meadows
and in the cold of the south your feet in its geography of duplicated gold.
Love, when I touch you not only have my hands explored your delight
but boughs and lands, fruits and water,
the springtime that I love, the desert moon, the breast of the wild dove,
the smoothness of stones worn away by the waters of the seas or the rivers
and the red thickness of the bush where thirst and hunger lie in wait.
And thus my spacious country welcomes me, little America, in your body. 2

However, it is easy to forget that this ”new” and eagerly coveted world was old as well. People coming from Asia settled there between 42,000 and 17,000 years ago. The last wave of migrants before the Europeans came were the Inuit who around 3500 BCE settled in the Arctic areas of North America. Nevertheless, these original settlers suffered drastic changes, their traditional way of life was crushed and transformed by a steady stream of Eurasian and African peoples. Migrants, slaves, and conquerors arrived in the ”new world”, settled and multiplied while the indigenous population plummeted. The newcomers did not only bring with them their culture but also diseases – influenza, pneumonic plagues, typhus, measles, cholera, malaria, mumps, yellow fever, pertussis, and smallpox, killing millions. It is assumed that 90 percent of the indigenous population in the hardest-hit areas died. This was one of the greatest human catastrophes in history, far exceeding The Black Death, which during five years in the mid-fourteen century killed up to one-third of the inhabitants of Europe and Asia. On top of this disaster came repression, expulsion, genocide, and enslavement of the natives. Nevertheless, new ideas and cultural expressions grew out of this cataclysm, cultures mingled and gave rise to something new.

Accordingly, the Americas and the Caribbean do in a certain sense remain a ”new world”, a habitat that has undergone transformations more drastic and profound than those that befell most societies in the ”old world”. The vibrant counter-culture of North America, the magic realism of Latin American authors, revolutionary and radical movements, pedagogy of the oppressed and liberation theology, all accompanied by stirring music mixing rhythms and tunes from all over the world. A mighty wave of cultural inspiration moving from south to north, from east to west. In distant Sweden I and my friends became inspired by such cultural contributions brought to us by movies, books, and records, but not only us, they also reached people from the entire ”third world”, Africa, south and southeast Asia, who in their turn contributed to the emergence of a youthful, radical and global culture.

I still felt this enthusiasm when I, due to various jobs and commitments, traveled back and forth across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The countries I visited still carried unhealed wounds of colonialism, plutocracy, and racism and LAC remains the most unequal region in the world, where injustices undermine the economic potential and wellbeing of its population. Nevertheless, in those days most nations appeared to recuperate from years of dictatorial repression and unpopular foreign interventions. Welfare programs, democracy, and social justice appeared to be on the rise. I even assumed that a new wave of inspiring change could come from the north, from a USA that no longer tried to hinder the development of true democracy south of its border:

It’s coming to America first.
The cradle of the best and of the worst.
It’s here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it’s here they got the spiritual thirst.
It’s here the family’s broken
and it’s here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way.
Democracy is coming to the USA. 3

But alas, people of the USA has chosen the narcissistic plutocrat Donald J. Trump as their president and ”when America sneezes the whole world catches cold” 4 To me the Americas no longer appear to be particularily ”new”, instead they seem to be stuck in bygone times, or are caught by a nostalgia for times that were even worse than they are now.

Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala continoue to suffer from crime and corruption. In January, Guatemala recently expelled a UN-backed anti-corruption commission investigating the affairs of its president Jimmy Morales. Despite Trump’s tough stance on migration, domestic instability and violence in Central American countries are likely to continue to force people to leave their homes. In Nicaragua, a power-drunk and former revolutionary leader, Daniel Ortega, claims that ”thieves” and ”coup-mongers” are creating unrest and sends journalists and protesters to jail. Violent street fighting have caused several hundred deaths thousands more have fled to neighboring Costa Rica. In 1918, Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez became the first person to lead Cuba outside the Castro family, which had been in power for more than six decades. However, Cubans are still waiting for democracy while Bermudez and his ministers declare that a new course is not likely to be set, having as their motto ”we are continuity”. The powerful and violent drug cartels of Colombia and Mexico are far from being subdued. Mexico’s new government has repeatedly assured the world about its commitment to combat druglords and rampant violence, but corruption remains endemic in Mexican society, reducing foreign investment and wiping out jobs from small and medium-sized businesses. 5

In Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro blames his country´s inflation rate of 10 million percent on an ”imperialist conspiracy” while hundreds of thousands Venezuelans are fleeing from home and country after a persistent struggle to find food and medicine. Many are arriving in neighboring Colombia, where in spite of positive reporting, drug lords and militias continue to thrive. In Brazil, the newly elected Jair Bolsonaro almost immediately issued a series of executive orders impinging the rights of minorities. Bolsonaro has been praising Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the most notorious torturer during General Ernesto Geisel´s dictatorship (1974-1979) and it appears as if he is considering oppressive military dictatorships of bygone days to have been beneficial for all, declaring he wants to ”make America great again. I want to make Brazil great, Paraguay great, Bolivia great, Uruguay — all of our countries.” 6 Evo Morales who since 2006 has led Bolivia is trying to continue his hold on power. He recently asked Bolivia´s Supreme Court to nullify the results of a 2016 referendum which rejected his bid to run for a fourth term and forced it to scrap limits for every political office in the country. Argentina´s former president, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who in spite of being embroiled in a myriad of ongoing corruption investigations remains popular with voters is expected to be President Mauricio Macri’s main competitor for the presidency in the October elections.

Maybe the Americas is not a new world after all. Like so many nations in the ”old world”, worrisome numbers of their leaders and voters seem to be stuck in an absurd nostalgia for a non-existent golden age of bygone eras.

]]>http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/09/new-world-americas-returning-old-problems/feed/0What Research Reveals about Drivers of Anti-immigrant Hate Crime in South Africahttp://www.ipsnews.net/2019/09/research-reveals-drivers-anti-immigrant-hate-crime-south-africa/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=research-reveals-drivers-anti-immigrant-hate-crime-south-africa
http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/09/research-reveals-drivers-anti-immigrant-hate-crime-south-africa/#respondMon, 09 Sep 2019 02:12:47 +0000Steven Gordonhttp://www.ipsnews.net/?p=163158Steven Gordon works for the Human Sciences Research Council as a senior research specialist. He receives funding from the Centre of Excellence in Human Development at the University of the Witswaterand.

Key leaders from the coalition of faith based organisations, trade unions, NGOs and corporate South Africa marched in 2015, speaking out against xenophobia during a peoples march in Newtown. Courtesy: GCIS

To combat anti-immigrant hate crime, we need to understand its drivers. Scholars at the Human Sciences Research Council have recently made new discoveries about the drivers of anti-immigrant hate crime in South Africa.

But beliefs about the role played by foreign nationals in the country clearly influence how people think about anti-immigrant hate crime. Anti-immigrant statements by politicians also feed into the problem.

Tracking anti-immigrant hate crime

Data from the South African Social Attitudes Survey, conducted annually since 2003, was used. The survey series consists of nationally representative, repeated cross-sectional surveys. It is designed as a time series and is increasingly providing a unique, long-term account of the speed and direction of change of public participation in anti-immigrant behaviour in contemporary South Africa.

Using this data, researchers have found that anti-immigrant hate crime is more widespread than previously thought.

Beginning in 2015, the following item was added in the survey questionnaire:

Have you taken part in violent action to prevent immigrants from living or working in your neighbourhood?

People may be disinclined to disclose this type of potentially incriminating information during face-to-face interviews. But community research suggests that the stigma attached to participation in xenophobic activities may not be as great as we may imagine. Still, the reader should be aware of this possible under-reporting of anti-immigrant behaviour when reviewing the survey’s results.

A minority of the South African adult population reported that they had participated in this form of anti-immigrant aggression. The share of the general public who admitted engaging in violence fluctuated within a very narrow band over the period 2015-2018. This shows the willingness of survey participants to respond to this question varies by only a small margin between the two periods. It also suggests a linear relationship between behavioural intention and attitudes.

The survey results demonstrate the ugly reality of violent anti-immigrant hate crime in South Africa. Although this is an important and dangerous type of prejudice, such crime is not the only form that xenophobia may take. Other forms of peaceful anti-immigrant discrimination are also evident in South African society.

Research has shown that more peaceful forms of anti-immigrant activities are often the first step in a process of escalation that leads to xenophobic violence. Past participation in peaceful anti-immigrant activity (such as demonstrations) was found to be a major determinant of this type of violence.

One of the most troubling findings to have emerged concerned possible participation in anti-immigrant aggression among those who had not taken part before. More than one in ten adults living in South Africa reported in the 2018 survey that they had not taken part in violent action against foreign nationals – but would be prepared to do so.

This finding is quite disturbing given that there may be under-reporting of the propensity for violent action. Anti-immigrant stereotypes were shown to be a robust driver of this kind of behavioural intention. This suggests that anti-immigrant attitudes could have a mobilising effect, spurring individuals towards acts of violent xenophobia.

The results of this study show that millions of ordinary South Africans are prepared to engage in anti-immigrant behaviour. So it is vital that the resources dedicated to combating xenophobia be equal to the size of the problem.

The South African government has a national action plan to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. The progressive measures put forward in the plan include immigrant integration, better law enforcement, civic education and increased immigrant access to constitutionally entitled rights.

Recent research suggests that many of these measures have a degree of public support. The plan was approved in March this year. If it’s to work, it requires adequate resources and support from all sectors of South African society.

Instead of focusing on short-term solutions civil society, foreign governments and the general public must work with the state to progressively implement this plan.

Steven Gordon works for the Human Sciences Research Council as a senior research specialist. He receives funding from the Centre of Excellence in Human Development at the University of the Witswaterand.

]]>http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/09/research-reveals-drivers-anti-immigrant-hate-crime-south-africa/feed/0After Two Years of Horrors in Burma, the U.S. Is Still Doing Too Little, Too Latehttp://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/two-years-horrors-burma-u-s-still-little-late/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=two-years-horrors-burma-u-s-still-little-late
http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/two-years-horrors-burma-u-s-still-little-late/#respondMon, 26 Aug 2019 12:55:05 +0000Nadine Maenza and Anurima Bhargavahttp://www.ipsnews.net/?p=162987Nadine Maenza is vice chair at the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and the founding Executive Director of Patriot Voices.Anurima Bhargava is a USCIRF commissioner, a civil rights lawyer who served in the Justice Department under the Obama Administration, and the president of Anthem of Us.

Monsoon season is currently wreaking havoc on the more than 911,000 Rohingya refugees displaced from their homeland in Burma (Myanmar) to the ramshackle camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.

Two years ago, in August 2017, a brutal military crackdown pushed more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims and other ethnic and religious minorities from Burma’s Rakhine State to flee for safety. The Burmese military has shamefully denied and tried to hide its barbarism, which includes arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, displacement, rape, torture and arbitrary killings.

And, Burma’s government has repudiated the international community’s attempts to document the crimes committed under international law, all while denying Rohingya basic rights like freedom of movement, access to health care and basic necessities, and citizenship.

Shockingly, those responsible for these heinous crimes—either by the explicit actions of Burma’s military or the complicit indifference of Burma’s government—have thus far faced no serious consequences. Where is the U.S. government’s admonition and strong policy response?

First, it is imperative that the U.S. government decide whether the atrocities committed against Rohingya Muslims, Christians and others in Burma constitute more than ethnic cleansing.

When the U.S. Department of State last year issued its report documenting atrocities in northern Rakhine State, it created an expectation that a more serious determination—either crimes against humanity or genocide—would be forthcoming.

The label “ethnic cleansing” unequivocally fails to capture the full extent of crimes that religious and ethnic communities in Burma have suffered at the hands of the military.

Second, the U.S. government must sanction Burmese military officials and the companies under the military’s control so that those who perpetrated these atrocities are held accountable for their crimes. The U.S. Department of the Treasury has imposed economic sanctions on five military officials and two military units under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, and the State Department placed travel bans on four other senior military leaders, including the commander-in-chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.

But banning the ability to travel to the United States is paltry compared to the monstrous acts the military has undertaken against religious and ethnic minorities. Targeted tools like economic sanctions must also be imposed on military officials and other responsible parties.

Thanks to a recent report issued by the United Nations’ Independent International Fact-Finding Mission, the international community now has a comprehensive list of the military’s businesses to consider for sanctions.

The entities on the list—including two major holding companies: Myanmar Economic Holdings Limited (MEHL) and Myanmar Economic Corporation (MEC)—are owned or influenced by Burma’s military and use the ill-gotten gains from their business ventures to commit human rights violations.

There may be legitimate concerns about the impact that sanctions or other bans will have on Burma’s economy and the overall bilateral relationship; for example, some fear that sanctions will push Burma into China’s arms.

These two countries are fair-weather friends: chummy when it’s advantageous and oppositional when it’s not. Sanctions by the United States and others will not change this calculus.

Tragically, Rohingya Muslims are not the only victims. Burma’s military and security forces have used the same playbook of ruthless tactics in Rakhine State as they have been using for decades against ethnic minorities—many of whom are Christians—in Kachin and northern Shan states and elsewhere. For two decades, USCIRF has tracked, monitored and raised these abuses with the U.S. government.

For these and other systematic, ongoing and egregious violations of religious freedom, we call on the State Department to re-designate Burma as a “country of particular concern” (CPC) pursuant to the International Religious Freedom Act.

This designation acknowledges that Burma is not living up to its commitments under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that protects the fundamental right to thought, conscience and religion.

Accountability is paramount, and the U.S. government must lead the way with a strong and substantive response. Yet for Rohingya Muslims and other religious and ethnic minorities, their future also is about justice and the ability to safely and voluntarily return home with dignity.

Rohingya Muslims need to know that they can return—either from refugee camps in Bangladesh or from the internally displaced persons camps in Rakhine State—to their homelands.

Plans by the governments of Bangladesh and Burma to repatriate Rohingya refugees should not move forward until conditions are independently verified as safe and Rohingya are consulted about their return, neither of which has happened. Other religious and ethnic minorities that face ongoing threats from the military and ethnic armed organizations require similar safe returns.

But first, the impunity and cycle of violence in Burma must end, and that starts when the U.S. government—including both the Administration and the U.S. Congress—steps up and leads the way for the international community to take a stand against such horrific human rights abuses.

* This opinion piece was written by the two authors who recently traveled to Burma and spoke with Rohingya Muslims and others.

Nadine Maenza is vice chair at the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and the founding Executive Director of Patriot Voices.Anurima Bhargava is a USCIRF commissioner, a civil rights lawyer who served in the Justice Department under the Obama Administration, and the president of Anthem of Us.

]]>http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/two-years-horrors-burma-u-s-still-little-late/feed/0Little Hope of Justice for Rohingya, Two Years after Exodushttp://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/little-hope-justice-rohingya-two-years-exodus/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=little-hope-justice-rohingya-two-years-exodus
http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/little-hope-justice-rohingya-two-years-exodus/#respondFri, 23 Aug 2019 16:29:27 +0000James Reinlhttp://www.ipsnews.net/?p=162949Two years after the start of an exodus of Rohingya civilians from genocide-like attacks in Myanmar, members of the mainly Muslim minority have little hope of securing justice, rights or returning to their homes, according to the United Nations and aid groups. Reports this week from the U.N. and Oxfam, a charity, show that, on […]

Two years after the start of an exodus of Rohingya civilians from genocide-like attacks in Myanmar, members of the mainly Muslim minority have little hope of securing justice, rights or returning to their homes, according to the United Nations and aid groups.

Reports this week from the U.N. and Oxfam, a charity, show that, on the second anniversary of the ethnic violence in Rakhine state, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya remain refugees in neighbouring Bangladesh or are effectively interred in domestic, government-run camps.

“Rohingya people feel as though they are in limbo with no end in sight. They are alive, but merely surviving,” said Elizabeth Hallinan, an Oxfam advocate on Rohingya issues, in a statement marking the beginning of the exodus on Aug. 25, 2017.

More than 730,000 Rohingya civilians fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state into Bangladesh amid a military-led crackdown in August 2017 that the U.N. and Western governments say included mass killings and gang-rapes.

Oxfam says some 500,000 Rohingya remain in Myanmar, including almost 130,000 confined in government-run camps and where red tape often leaves them unable to send children to school or to visit a doctor.

This week, Bangladesh and the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) announced plans to assess whether some 3,450 Rohingya refugees will accept Myanmar’s offer to return home, nearly a year after another major repatriation scheme failed.

Many refugees refuse to go back, fearing more violence, Radhika Coomaraswamy, an expert from the U.N. Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, told reporters Thursday, as persecution continues to threaten them in the South Asian nation.

Coomaraswamy described satellite images of what had been Rohingya villages in Rakhine state, where the government’s slash-and-burn approach had seen settlements “bulldozed” until there was “not a tree standing”.

Sending Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar would expose them to “near-apartheid laws”, and a government that must give approval for marriages between Buddhist women and men of other faiths, including Muslims.

“What are we sending them into, unless there’s some kind of promises being made for a pathway to citizenship that will give them rights?” Coomaraswamy asked in a press briefing in New York

“It’s not only the issue of safety, physically, but also the fact that they should not have to live like people are living in” the displacement camps in Sittwe and elsewhere in Rakhine state, she added.

In Coomaraswamy’s report, the panel of independent investigators, set up by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2017, said the sexual violence committed by Myanmar troops against Rohingya women and girls in 2017 showed a genocidal intent to destroy the group.

“Hundreds of Rohingya women and girls were raped, with 80 percent of the rapes corroborated by the mission being gang rapes. The Tatmadaw (military) was responsible for 82 percent of these gang rapes,” the 61-page document said.

Myanmar’s government has denied entry to the U.N. investigators, who instead visited refugee camps in Bangladesh, Malaysia and Thailand, and spoke with humanitarians, academics and researchers.

Myanmar’s mission to the U.N. did not answer requests for comment from IPS. Myanmar denies widespread wrongdoing and says the military campaign across hundreds of villages in northern Rakhine was in response to attacks by Rohingya militants.

Coomaraswamy called on world leaders and CEO’s to cut business ties with the Tatmadaw’s businesses, and said there was a small window of hope for prosecutions under a U.N. investigation mechanism in Geneva.

The panel has gathered new evidence about alleged perpetrators and added their names to a confidential list to be given to U.N. human rights boss Michelle Bachelet and another U.N. inquiry that is readying cases for possible future trials.

]]>http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/little-hope-justice-rohingya-two-years-exodus/feed/0Five Million Palestinians Deserve Better!http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/five-million-palestinians-deserve-better/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=five-million-palestinians-deserve-better
http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/five-million-palestinians-deserve-better/#respondMon, 12 Aug 2019 10:40:58 +0000Ian Williamshttp://www.ipsnews.net/?p=162825Ian Williams is a former President of the UN Correspondents Association (UNCA) and author of "UNtold: The Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War

An old adage passed on by veteran U.N. staff to younger recruits is, “Do nothing whenever possible. It’s safer.” For a junior officer that might indeed be career-enhancing.

But—in the face of persistent hostility from the U.S. and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s friends around the world—for the secretary-general of the U.N., or even the commissioner general of UNRWA, it is a recipe for disaster.

And sometimes doing a little is even worse.

Antonio Guterres announced the appointment of Christian Saunders as deputy commissioner general of UNRWA but the U.N secretary-general failed to explain what had happened to Saunders’ predecessor, Sandra Mitchell, let alone the chain of circumstances that led to her departure.

Saunders is experienced and well-respected, but making him deputy commissioner general while leaving Pierre Krähenbühl, the person primarily responsible for the scandal, as commissioner-general for UNRWA is like throwing a sardine into a school of sharks. It has, predictably, just whetted the appetites of UNWRA’s enemies—but has not provided sustenance for its friends.

The secretary-general is presumably aware that after Al Jazeera (and the Washington Report) began its investigation into the UNRWA Ethics Office’s report on Krähenbühl’s management (see Aug./Sept. 2019 Washington Report, p. 17), Krähenbühl in quick succession lost three senior staff members, including both his chef de cabinet and deputy commissioner.

Major donors, not least, Krähenbühl’s own Swiss government pulled their funding because of the Report, which called for his immediate dismissal.

All those countries have been loyal friends of the U.N. and of UNRWA, and their defunding shows clearly that the Ethics Office report made a compelling case to them. It is also clear that the governments concerned are trying to send signals to the U.N., whose response to the crisis has been a textbook case of complacent bureaucratic ineptitude.

After this writer’s report on UNWRA corruption came out in Al Jazeera, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki R. Haley wrote on Twitter, “This is Exactly [sic] why we stopped their funding.”

In fact, that was an outright lie. The Trump administration only did as Israel asked and pulled its contribution to UNRWA for malicious reasons having nothing to do with Commissioner General Krähenbüh’s love life or travel arrangements.

Credit: UN

Instead it was because UNRWA’s continuing existence is a persistent institutional reminder of U.S. complicity in Israel’s dispossession of some six million Palestinians. Admittedly, it was also because a particular subset of ambitious Republicans looks for large campaign donations from a coterie of very rich right-wing donors who consistently display their disdain for Palestinian rights by helping fund Jewish-only settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

There is no need for the secretary-general to take advice from countries whose oft-condemned actions created and perpetuated so many decades of misery for the Palestinians

However, knowing that both Washington and Tel Aviv entertain such sentiments makes the insouciance of both Secretary-General Guterres and Krähenbühl even more egregious. The ethics report detailing the managerial failings and turpitude in UNRWA was delivered to the secretary-general’s office back in December 2018.

The UNRWA staff who had contributed to it fretted that no action was being taken after many of them had risked their livelihoods and pensions.

They were amazed that such a compelling dossier from the organization’s own Ethics Department would be ignored, and it was only after months had passed that some of them leaked it to me, in the hope that media inquiries about the report would prompt pre-emptive action by the U.N., and that the commissioner general would lance the boil before the pustulent Trump/Netanyahu axis began to fester on it.

Ambassadors and senior U.N. officials were approached to press the secretary-general’s office for the action necessary, but to no avail.

Faced with such a damning indictment from his own ethics office, Krähenbühl could have, and should have, resigned or stepped aside for the good of the organization. The secretary-general could have suspended or fired him and announced a genuinely independent inquiry, enlisting donors and others concerned with the welfare of UNRWA and the Palestinians.

Predictably, the failures of the commissioner general and U.N. headquarters to take action—of any kind—has set off a feeding frenzy among the enemies of the Palestinians and UNRWA, who want to punish refugees for the ethical failings of bureaucrats foisted on them by an international community that oversaw their dispossession.

An unannounced internal investigation by the U.N.’s own Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS)—whose reputation is far from stellar even inside the U.N.—is a politically disastrous course of action. It took repeated questioning before we even discovered the investigation was under way—at a time when the secretary-general’s office denied it had even seen the report.

It was conceivable that, without media publicity, the OIOS report could have been a bland procedural whitewash, as have been too many about recent scandals involving senior U.N. staff.

But the media exposure means that Krähenbühl has little or no support from his present and recent senior staff, and certainly not from the donors. His rigor mortis-like grip on office is profoundly damaging to UNWRA, to the U.N., and to the more than five million Palestinians it serves.

In any case, confronted with such a manifest managerial failure, a traditional international civil servant should have accepted responsibility and resigned: by clinging to office Krähenbühl is giving succour to his agency’s enemies.

One could add that the scandal reflects an erosion of the concept of an ethical international service under a constant corrosive drip of short-term contracts and outsourcing urged by those experts who brought us the 2008 financial crisis.

Even so, Secretary-General Guterres can still ameliorate the crisis—first, of course, by inviting Krähenbühl’s immediate departure, but then by a resounding public declaration of how essential UNRWA’s work is.

Persuading a senior diplomat or U.N. figure to take over from Krähenbühl is a bit like fitting someone for a crown of thorns, but there are people out there who care enough about the Palestinians and who are prepared to stand up to the barrage of bile from worldwide Friends of Likud.

Above all, there is no need for the secretary-general to take advice from countries whose oft-condemned actions created and perpetuated so many decades of misery for the Palestinians.

He would, however, do well to invite donors and other humanitarian organizations to examine the agency and recommend much needed managerial and structural reforms, without pandering to those whose solution to the refugee problem is to leave them homeless and hungry while declaring them no longer to be refugees.

The original story appeared in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

]]>http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/five-million-palestinians-deserve-better/feed/0Will Palestinian Refugees Pay a Heavy Price for UNRWA Bungling?http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/will-palestinian-refugees-pay-heavy-price-unrwa-bungling/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=will-palestinian-refugees-pay-heavy-price-unrwa-bungling
http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/will-palestinian-refugees-pay-heavy-price-unrwa-bungling/#respondThu, 08 Aug 2019 12:00:13 +0000Thalif Deenhttp://www.ipsnews.net/?p=162772A crisis that has threatened to undermine the future of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is expected to have a devastating impact—not only on the credibility of the United Nations– but also on the lives of over five million Palestinian refugees whose very survival depends on the humanitarian services provided by the beleaguered […]

A crisis that has threatened to undermine the future of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) is expected to have a devastating impact—not only on the credibility of the United Nations– but also on the lives of over five million Palestinian refugees whose very survival depends on the humanitarian services provided by the beleaguered UN agency based in Amman and Gaza.

Mouin Rabbani, Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, told IPS: “This crisis must be resolved on an accelerated schedule in accordance with proper organisational procedures, both for its own sake, and to ensure that Palestinian refugees are not forced to pay the price of what is indisputably a political campaign led by the US and Israel to eliminate Palestinian refugees and their rights from the international agenda.”

Rabbani said one needs to look at this crisis from both an organisational and political perspective.

Viewed from an organisational perspective, he said, UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krahenbuhl stands formally accused of illegitimately concentrating decision-making authority in the hands of a small circle of hand-picked associates, and using these powers to engage in extremely serious abuses of authority.

Significantly, Rabbani pointed out, these accusations have emanated from within UNRWA, and also from the Ethics Office, which claims to have “credible and corroborated” evidence, presented in a detailed report forwarded to the Office of the UN Secretary General, and has been deemed sufficiently credible to result in a formal investigation by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS).

While investigations are continuing, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands, have suspended their contributions to UNRWA. And back in January 2018, the Trump administration decided, primarily for political reasons, to withhold $65m out of a $125m aid package earmarked for UNRWA triggering a financial crisis.

A former senior UN official, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed alarm that some member states had rushed to suspend their vitally needed contributions to UNRWA, which would punish innocent Palestinians, tens of thousands of whose children would be tipped into further deprivation.

“To take such a drastic step on the basis of media coverage of a confidential internal report not available to member states and which they know is still being investigated by OIOS, is far too harsh, especially at a time when even the separation of a single immigrant child from his parents is rightly considered unacceptable,” he declared.

He told IPS he was concerned about the demonization of UNRWA’s senior officials on the basis only of this confidential Ethics Office report’s media accounts, which are necessarily selective but could also be erroneous, misleading or downright malicious, especially on a charged issue like Palestine and Israel.

He said the Ethics Office is a key UN unit designed to check abuses, and its reports are taken seriously.

But it does not have the mandate or the resources to conduct definitive investigations, so it gathers and presents information and evidence to OIOS for determination, he argued.

However, he emphasized that even if OIOS found serious lapses by top managers, Palestinian refugees should not be made to suffer.

He said UNRWA was struck a near-catastrophic blow when President Trump terminated the US’s $360m annual contribution. But an intense, ongoing UNRWA campaign had by last month raised over $110m from other countries.

“If UNRWA were riddled with serious dysfunction at the top, I cannot imagine that member states would be totally unaware and would have been so exceptionally supportive,” he declared.

According to UNRWA, the UN agency is funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions. The only exception is a very limited subsidy from the regular budget of the United Nations, which is used exclusively for administrative costs.

“The work of UNRWA could not be carried out without sustained contributions from state and regional governments, the European Union and other government partners, which represented 93.28 per cent of all contributions in 2018.”

In 2018, said UNRWA, 50 per cent of the Agency’s total pledges of $ 1.27 billion came from EU member states, who contributed $643 million, including through the European Commission.

The EU (including the European Commission), Germany and Saudi Arabia were the largest individual donors, contributing a cumulative 40 per cent of the Agency’s overall funding. The United Kingdom and Sweden were also among the top five donors.

Rabbani told IPS the proper thing for Krahenbuhl to do is to immediately resign if he knows these accusations to be substantiated, or, in view of the severity of the accusations, which cannot be dismissed as frivolous complaints by a hostile external party, to immediately step aside pending the conclusion of the OIOS investigation if he believes he is being falsely accused.

Should he refuse to do so, as seems to be the case, Secretary-General (SG) Guterres should exercise his responsibility and place Krahenbuhl on administrative leave with immediate effect until the matter is resolved.

“This is what would one would expect to transpire, and in fact often does, in both the public and private sectors. The removal of several of Krahenbuhl’s subordinates and appointment of an acting Deputy Director for UNRWA is an insufficient response that arguably serves only to deepen the crisis and increase the damage to both UNRWA and the UN,” he noted.

It additionally does the UN no favours, Rabbani said, that the ethics report and accusations against Krahenbuhl were communicated to the SG’s office in late 2018, and no significant action was undertaken until the report was leaked to the press over the summer.

This point is underscored by the decision of several key UNRWA funders (Belgium, The Netherlands, and Switzerland) to suspend contributions to the agency and the prospect of similar measures by other states.

From a political perspective, he said, it is vital to note that this crisis has erupted at a critical time for UNRWA. UNRWA’s very existence is under attack by the Trump administration, which hopes to leverage its campaign against the agency to liquidate the Palestine refugee question altogether.

Additionally, UNRWA’s mandate is up for renewal later this year. Many people will and in fact are raising questions about the confluence between the timing of these leaks and the intensification of the US campaign against the agency and Palestinian refugees.

The political context makes decisive action by the UN all the more urgent. CG Krahenbuhl’s mandate, which he has held since 2014, is to serve the needs of the Palestinian refugees, who are the most vulnerable sector of the embattled Palestinian people, Rabbani noted.

“This crisis, and his response to its eruption, is the ultimate test of his commitment to this mandate, and if he fails it UN senior leadership should intervene decisively and without further delay in the interests of both the UN, UNRWA, and the Palestinian refugees it serves”.

Without prejudice to the severity of the accusations being discussed, it is important to note that a) These accusations have been levelled against individuals within UNRWA rather than the agency itself; b) The UNRWA ethics report itself notes that the decision by the US to terminate contributions to UNRWA and campaign to seek the agency’s elimination, and the resultant crisis at the agency, forms the context in which these abuses of authority transpired; c) The abuses of authority and other misconduct detailed in the report are hardly unique to UNRWA, and similar and arguable more serious abuses have been documented at other UN agencies over the years; d) the accusations primarily concern expatriate senior officials (Krahenbuhl is Swiss and his former deputy an American) rather than Palestinian staff – the sole Palestinian staff member implicated has already been dismissed, Rabbani declared.

]]>http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/will-palestinian-refugees-pay-heavy-price-unrwa-bungling/feed/0Environmental Migration a Global Challengehttp://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/environmental-migration-global-challenge/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=environmental-migration-global-challenge
http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/environmental-migration-global-challenge/#respondTue, 06 Aug 2019 13:33:30 +0000Dina Ionescohttp://www.ipsnews.net/?p=162734Dina Ionesco is the head of the Migration, Environment and Climate Change Division at the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM), which has been at the forefront of efforts to study the links between migration, the environment and climate.

The Atlas of Environmental Migration, which gives examples dating as far back as 45,000 years ago, shows that environmental changes and natural disasters have played a role in how the population is distributed on our planet throughout history.

However, it is highly likely that undesirable environmental changes directly created by, or amplified by, climate change, will extensively change the patterns of human settlement.

Future degradation of land used for agriculture and farming, the disruption of fragile ecosystems and the depletion of precious natural resources like fresh water will directly impact people’s lives and homes.

The climate crisis is already having an effect: according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 17.2 million people had to leave their homes last year, because of disasters that negatively affected their lives.

Slow changes in the environment, such as ocean acidification, desertification and coastal erosion, are also directly impacting people’s livelihoods and their capacity to survive in their places of origin.

There is a strong possibility that more people will migrate in search of better opportunities, as living conditions get worse in their places of origin:

There are predictions for the twenty-first century indicating that even more people will have to move as a result of these adverse climate impacts. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the main UN authority on climate science, has repeatedly said that the changes brought on by the climate crisis will influence migration patterns.

The World Bank has put forward projections for internal climate migration amounting to 143 million people by 2050 in three regions of the world, if no climate action is taken.

However, our level of awareness and understanding of how environmental factors affect migration, and how they also interact with other migration drivers such as demographic, political and economic conditions, has also changed. With enhanced knowledge, there is more incentive to act urgently, be prepared and respond.

The Global Compact for Migration: a roadmap for governments

In the past decade, there has been a growing political awareness of the issues around environmental migration, and increasing acceptance that this is a global challenge.

Herders take their animals to drink water in Niger., by FAO/Giulio Napolitano

The Compact contains many references to environmental migration including a whole section on measures to address environmental and climate challenges: it is the first time that a comprehensive vision has been laid out, showing how states can handle – now and in the future – the impacts of climate change, disasters and environmental degradation on international migration.

Our analysis of the Compact highlights the priorities of states, when it comes to addressing environmental migration. Their primary concern is to “minimize the adverse drivers and structural factors that compel people to leave their country of origin”, in particular the “natural disasters, the adverse effects of climate change, and environmental degradation”.

In other words, the main priority is to find solutions that allow people to stay in their homes and give them the means to adapt to changing environmental conditions. This approach aims to avoid instances of desperate migration and its associated tragedies.

Rohingya refugees make their way down a footpath during a heavy monsoon downpour in Kutupalong refugee settlement, Cox’s Bazar district. 2018. Credit: UNHCR/David Azia

However, where climate change impacts are too intense, another priority put forward in the Compact is to “enhance availability and flexibility of pathways for regular migration. States are thus looking at solutions for people to be able to migrate safely and through regular channels, and at solutions for those already on the move.

A last resort measure is to conduct planned relocations of population – this means organizing the relocation of entire villages and communities away from areas bearing the brunt of climate change impacts.

Humanitarian assistance and protection for those on the move already, are also tools states can use. Finally, states highlight that relevant data and knowledge are key to guide the decision-making process. Without knowing more and analyzing better, policies run the risk of missing their targets and fade into irrelevance.

A range of solutions to a complex problem

Responding to the challenges of environmental migration in a way that benefits both countries and communities, including migrants and refugees, is a complex process involving many different actors.

Solutions can range from tweaking migration practices, such as visa regimes, to developing human rights-based protection measures. Most importantly, they involve a coordinated approach from national governments, bringing together experts from different walks of life:

There is no one single solution to respond to the challenge of environmental migration, but there are many solutions that tackle different aspects of this complex equation. Nothing meaningful can ever be achieved without the strong involvement of civil society actors and the communities themselves who very often know what is best for them and their ways of life.

I also think that we need to stop discourses that focus only on migrants as victims of tragedy. The bigger picture is certainly bleak at times, but we need to remember that migrants demonstrate everyday their resilience and capacity to survive and thrive in difficult situations.

Dina Ionesco is the head of the Migration, Environment and Climate Change Division at the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM), which has been at the forefront of efforts to study the links between migration, the environment and climate.

]]>http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/environmental-migration-global-challenge/feed/0Protect, Support and Empower Girls in Lake Chad Regionhttp://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/protect-support-empower-girls-lake-chad-region/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=protect-support-empower-girls-lake-chad-region
http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/protect-support-empower-girls-lake-chad-region/#respondMon, 05 Aug 2019 11:14:37 +0000Lakshi De Vass Gunawardenahttp://www.ipsnews.net/?p=162690As Lake Chad enters its 10th year of conflict, millions of young girls are being used and manipulated in grotesque ways. Maria Sole Fanuzzi, Lake Chad Child Protection Specialist at Plan International, said: “New York City has 8.25 million people, so when we talk about the girls in the Lake Chad crisis, you have to […]

Lake Chad isn’t really a lake any more. Most of it is islands and inlets. Credit: UNHCR/A. Bahaddou

By Lakshi De Vass GunawardenaUNITED NATIONS, Aug 5 2019 (IPS)

As Lake Chad enters its 10th year of conflict, millions of young girls are being used and manipulated in grotesque ways.

Maria Sole Fanuzzi, Lake Chad Child Protection Specialist at Plan International, said: “New York City has 8.25 million people, so when we talk about the girls in the Lake Chad crisis, you have to imagine the whole city where we are now is completely filled by children, and half of that would be girls.”

She was speaking at an event co-hosted last week by the Permanent Mission of Belgium, the Government of Niger, and Plan International.

Spanning across Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, and Chad, the Lake Chad crisis is a complex one, attributed to extreme poverty, climate change, underdevelopment, and attacks by the jihadist group Boko Haram, which garnered international attention with the kidnapping of 276 girls from a school in Nigeria in 2014.

A report by Plan International has revealed that over 15% of girls aged 10-19 had been married at least once or were currently married. As a result, the levels of girls’ education have drastically decreased.

With this, there is a severe lack of information concerning sexual and reproductive health. The Lake Chad basin has one of the highest rates of maternal deaths anywhere in the world, with about 773.4 deaths for every 100,000 successful births.

“Conflicts and disasters amplify this relative powerlessness of girls,’” said Sole, pointing out that the crisis affects girls disproportionately, where they are faced with situations, such as the deprivation of basic needs, sexual and gender-based violence and harmful practices such as trafficking, forced as suicide bombers and child marriages.

Those that survive and do manage to return home are confronted with discrimination and stigmatization from their communities and are even accused of witchcraft, she said.

“They are considered to have somehow absorbed the demon of the enemy- to have somehow given their consent,” she explained.

“And for the children in there that might have conceived during their captivity are unwanted, unrecognized and chased away.”

Credit: World Bank

Sole went on to narrate the story of a girl from Cameroon who stated that “If a girl gets pregnant out of wedlock, and no matter if we consent or not, it is a sign of terrible doom, that will fall on her house.”

She then described a case two months ago where a girl had been abused, and thus conceived out of wedlock returned home only to be rejected for “bringing shame to her house.”

Still, “some important initiatives have been taken,” Sole announced.

These initiatives include strengthening of social and emotional learning; building confidence; fostering relationships; harmonizing with their communities to build safe environments; economic empowerment and adequate education. However, it is important to educate the boys as well, she noted.

“The engagement of men and boys is crucial to tackle gendered social norms. the change cannot happen if masculinity continues to be seen as the affirmation of a predominance over the other gender,” Sole told IPS.

Boys and men get raped constantly in the world, and conflict all the more exasperated the exposure and the impact of this phenomenon.

“They are exploited as child workers, they are trafficked, and when they are deprived of sexual and reproductive health rights they are also deprived of their own right to a positive fatherhood,” she added.

“After all, the gendered norms that prescribe masculinity as an aggressive form of domination deprive also men and boys of that peaceful coexistence that eventually turn into the many males dominated wars we see worldwide. So, no wonder that statistics show that more equal societies are also more peaceful ones.”

“Boys and girls do share a common destiny and as much as we recognize the different perspectives of one and the other our ultimate goal is to empower both of them to live free from oppression and free to express their own human personality to the fullest and greatest extent,” she declared.

“We need to look at adolescents for what they are- humans.”

Asked what role Plan International will have going forward, Jessica Malter, Senior Communications and Advocacy Advisor at Planned International, told IPS: “Plan International is committed to working together with international partners and local entities to advance girls rights in the Lake Chad Basin and worldwide”

She further noted that they are working on developing integrated programs “that address the complex and interconnected issues affecting adolescents, such as lack of education, child marriage, early pregnancy, child labour and sexual exploitation and that

“We cannot continue to address these issues with single-sector responses or ad-hoc interventions.”

She also stressed the importance of incorporating the young generation stating that “including young people in the decision making that impacts their lives is absolutely critical, and note that

“We still do not sufficiently listen to young people, and particularly not adolescent girls who are often invisible”, said Malter.

“It is rare though, that girls are given the opportunity to express their views.
That said, they do have a way of tackling the issue.

Malter said “one way we are addressing this is with the Girls Get Equal, which is a global campaign that provides girls and young women the tools and resources they need to demand power, freedom and representation. age disaggregated data, to strengthen evidence and better inform programmes.”

Asked about what surprised her the most about the survivors she encountered, Sole said: “The most striking thing in almost every encounter is to see how incredibly resilient girls and boys are. They face the unspoken, some of them have witnessed the slaughter of their own parents, almost all of them are mothers to their younger siblings, and yet you can see a strength to restart and to rebuild their lives that is uncommon in most of our wealthier societies.

“Girls agency is something that can be at times challenging, but the recognition of this factor is the only way to trace back the logical, historical and societal meaning into the events that we witness and within which we move.”

“Girls and women cannot be confined to the role of the victims and need to play a major role into the rebuilding of their own lives whenever conflicts have broken the flow of their existence and shaken their previous foundations.”

With this is mind, it will be a victory to watch the growth and success of these children if/ when it happens.

“They are the beginning and the end of their own history making.” Sole concluded.

Scores of migrants and refugees have been desperately trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Credit: Ilaria Vechi / IPS

By Blerim MustafaGENEVA, Aug 1 2019 (IPS)

The migrant and refugee crisis has become a serious test for the unity of Europe as a political project. The inflow of destitute migrants and refugees has tested Europe’s political unity to an unprecedented extent. With a long-term solution to the migrant and refugee crisis nowhere in sight, the adverse impact of the current situation has the potential to unfold further and to give rise to a broader crisis with long-term implications, affecting Europe and the MENA region alike.

In his influential essay “The End of History?”, Professor Francis Fukuyama predicted that the universalization of the Western concept of liberal democracy, in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, would prevail and erase differences between peoples, societies, civilizations and world regions. Nevertheless, the manipulation of despair and the violent destruction of lives and assets in the Middle East have taken their toll in terms of the radicalization of youth. The re-emergence of populism in advanced countries continue to divide their societies. The situation is particularly striking in countries of Central and Eastern Europe that witnessed a surge in nationalist sentiments once the communist era came to an end and that did not have a colonial past. In Western Europe, the adverse impact of globalization and the financial crisis have given rise to the notion of a lost generation in which Europe’s youth experience greater degrees of impoverishment, inequality and unemployment. A political vacuum has therefore emerged, which has given rise to movements that anchor their ideologies on anti-globalization, unilateralism, protectionism and extreme forms of nationalism. Progress is being achieved to come to terms with its deadly sting, but populism in the West and extremism in the Middle East – spilling over into Europe – cannot be set against one another. The former is still – but for how long – predominantly peaceful in nature while the latter is generating political violence.

Populist parties are emerging as credible actors in light of the recent electoral successes in local and national elections. Their recipe for success: spread of fear, anger, hatred and xenophobia towards refugees and migrants in an attempt to confer legitimacy to their political ideologies. Right wing and populist parties in the West are on the offensive and are now threatening the democratic traditions of a continent referred to as the birthplace of democracy, liberalism and Enlightenment. It challenges the legitimacy of national governments and threatens to restore extreme forms of nationalistic reactions that constitute direct threats to peace, reconciliation and international cooperation. It remains a paradox that countries in Central and Eastern Europe – often the most vocal critics of the arrival of migrants and refugees – have one of the lowest percentages of people belonging to Islam. These are the countries that have benefitted most from inter-EU migration and from an open labour market. Populism, however, does not arise out of nowhere. Establishment political parties have catered to the wealthy and failed to address burning social issues, thus creating a vacuum into which political opportunists could move.

Another feature that is ubiquitous is the tendency to externalise responses to address the plight of people on the move. In this regard, fences and walls have been erected and borders sealed off in an attempt to outsource and externalise solutions to address the rise of people on the move. In addition to the notorious wall between US and Mexico, which will be made even more repellent, and to the no less notorious one cutting off the Palestinian Occupied Territories, border fences and wires have been erected between the borders of Spanish enclaves (Melilla, Ceuta)/Morocco, Slovenia/Croatia, Hungary/Croatia, Hungary/Serbia, Macedonia/Greece, Turkey/Greece and Bulgaria/Turkey. Hungary has also considered erecting a fence along the Hungarian/Romanian border in response to the influx of people on the move.

Although it is the sovereign right of every country to implement measures deemed appropriate to protect their national borders, these physical barriers can come in conflict with the right of people to seek asylum as stipulated in article 14, paragraph 1, of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (a right, however, not included in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights), and in the 1951 Refugees Convention, which defines a refugee as a person outside his country of nationality who has a well founded fear of persecution if returned to his country of origin. Providing assistance and protection to refugees is, therefore, in line with States’ obligations under international law and not only with their moral duties to respond to the dire situation many desperate people are facing. In this connection, it is worth referring to Pope Francis’s tweet made on 18 March 2017 where he appealed to decision-makers to not “build walls but bridges, to conquer evil with good, offence with forgiveness, to live in peace with everyone.” Pope Francis has likewise urged societies “to welcome, to protect, to promote, and to integrate migrants and refugees”.

The origin of attempts in Europe to “externalize” solutions to the refugee and migrant crisis can be traced back to the 1990 Dublin Convention. The latter stipulates the right to deport migrants and refugees to the first country of arrival, primarily to Greece, Spain and Italy, which are the first European entry points for people on the move owing to their geographical location. Countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea therefore are faced with the burden of absorbing the migrant and refugee inflows from the MENA region. This approach has contributed to an unfair distribution and relocation system of migrants and refugees where countries neighbouring bordering Syria and Iraq and then European countries situated on the Mediterranean Sea coast are the most affected. In the report of the United Nations Secretary-General addressing large movements of migrants and refugees – submitted in April 2016 to the United Nations General Assembly – he regretted that “too often, responsibility for new arrivals lies with the authorities and host communities in the first country of arrival.”

The European Union (EU) has also attempted to work with neighbouring states to defuse the crisis and to externalise solutions to control the flow of people on the move. It appears that the EU has drawn inspiration from the Australian government that have established refugee camps in neighbouring countries such as the island state of Nauru to address the inflow of refugees. In this connection, an agreement was reached between EU and Turkey, in March 2016, which stipulates, inter alia, that Ankara accepts the return of illegal migrants entering Europe. In counterpart, the EU would commit to investing EUR 3 billion to support livelihood projects for returning migrants. A similar position has also been taken vis-à-vis another migratory transit country Libya, in which the EU is committed to supporting the endeavours of the Libyan government to detain migrants and refugees in confinement camps. In response to this practice, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein referred to the detention of migrants and refugees in Libya as “an outrage to humanity”.

Despite these attempts to outsource solutions to the migrant and refugee crisis, inflows of people on the move have not ceased as the main destination regions of migrants and refugees remain the advanced and developed countries in Northern Europe. In this connection, the migrant and refugee crisis is not sustainable in the long run either for Europe or for the Arab region. The rise of populism in Europe – which so far remains political in nature – and the rise of violent extremism in the Middle East – which is an immediate threat – endanger the long-term stability of both regions and has the potential to stir an even bigger migrant and refugee crisis in the future. The root-causes of the unprecedented flow of people on the move have multiple causes, which require a multilevel response. It is imperative that decision-makers recognise the multitude of factors that contribute to the forced displacement of people. Most importantly, peace and stability and a climate conducive to the development of and the respect for human rights must be restored. It is hard to imagine why refugees and migrants would return to their home societies if sustainable and alternative livelihood options are not in place to meet the individual and collective needs of peoples and societies, and if wars and armed conflicts continue unabated.

Blerim Mustafa, Project and communications officer, the Geneva Centre for Human Rights Advancement and Global Dialogue. Postgraduate researcher (Ph.D. candidate) at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester (UK).

]]>http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/migration-human-solidarity/feed/2One Month Since Libya’s Migrant Tragedy, Detentions Continuehttp://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/one-month-since-libyas-migrant-tragedy-detentions-continue/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=one-month-since-libyas-migrant-tragedy-detentions-continue
http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/one-month-since-libyas-migrant-tragedy-detentions-continue/#commentsThu, 01 Aug 2019 12:00:20 +0000James Reinlhttp://www.ipsnews.net/?p=162665It is almost one month since an airstrike on a detention centre in Libya killed and injured scores of migrants and refugees locked up inside, many of whom were detained for doing nothing worse than fleeing instability or seeking better lives in Europe. This week, it looked like world powers were finally making an effort […]

One month after the attack on Tajoura, Libya which killed 53 detainees and injured more than 87 others, little has been done to help the incarcerated migrants in the turbulent country. Many sub-Saharan Africans migrants go to Libya hoping to make it to Europe and a better life. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By James ReinlUNITED NATIONS, Aug 1 2019 (IPS)

It is almost one month since an airstrike on a detention centre in Libya killed and injured scores of migrants and refugees locked up inside, many of whom were detained for doing nothing worse than fleeing instability or seeking better lives in Europe.

This week, it looked like world powers were finally making an effort to persuade Libya’s United Nations-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) to come good on its promise to free the thousands of refugees in lockups under its control.

At a U.N. Security Council meeting on Monday, diplomats were “concerned by the situation of refugees and migrants” in Libya, and were poised to take action, last month’s council president and Peruvian envoy Gustavo Meza-Cuadra told reporters afterwards.

Earlier, diplomats heard from the U.N.’s envoy to Libya, Ghassan Salame, who said the Jul. 2 bloodbath at the facility in Tajoura, a suburb of Libya’s capital, Tripoli, should prompt officials to close such centres once and for all.

“What is required is that they be shuttered,” Salame said via a video link from Tripoli.

“I urge the council now to call upon the authorities in Tripoli to take the long-delayed but much-needed strategic decision to free those who are detained in these centres.”

One month after the attack on Tajoura, which killed 53 detainees and injured more than 87 others — mostly sub-Saharan Africans who were seeking better lives in Europe — little has been done to help the incarcerated migrants in the turbulent country.

Despite GNA pledges to close Tajoura, officials instead filled the bombed-out hangar on a military base with some 200 new migrants and refugees since the late-night air strike that caused chaos and carnage in eastern Tripoli.

To make matters worse, new detainees include migrants who were picked up by Libya’s coast guard after their vessel capsized in the Mediterranean on Jul. 26 — a catastrophe that saw as many as 150 passengers drown.

Some 5,000 refugees and migrants are detained in facilities under the control of or linked to the GNA, Salame said. Some 3,800 of these were on the front lines of fighting in the North African country’s civil war.

The Lebanese diplomat also criticised the European Union (EU) for funding a scheme that sees Libya’s coast guard intercept migrant boats at sea before returning them to Libya and detaining them in places like Tajoura.

Likewise, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other campaign groups have criticised the 28-nation bloc for bemoaning Libya’s ill-treatment of migrants while at the same time backing schemes that lead to abuse.

Amnesty has decried the “utterly inhumane” conditions inside Libya’s migrant lockups, where detainees have “little access to food, water or medical care” and endure “brutal treatment, torture, rape – and even being sold”.

John Dalhuisen, a regional expert with the European Stability Initiative, a think-tank, said the EU was complicit in abuses by making it harder for refugees and migrants to exit Libya and cross the Mediterranean.

“The EU has backed a policy that essentially amounts to containment. It has invested and trained the Libyan coast guard and reduced its own rescue services in a very successful effort to stop migrants reaching Europe,” Dalhuisen told IPS.

“It made some effort to improve conditions in Libyan detention facilities and secure access to them for international agencies, but with very modest results.”

An EU spokesperson told IPS that it backs Libya’s coast guard in an effort to stop refugees and migrants from perishing at sea, but that the 28-nation bloc was strongly against locking them up back on Libyan soil.

Some have been assessed and gained refuge in Europe; others have been settled elsewhere, such as Niger. But these schemes have only affected a tiny proportion of the estimated half-million refugees and migrants in Libya.

Judith Sunderland, an associate director for HRW, said “space is limited” in UNHCR resettlement schemes and there are logjams, with few “longer-term solutions” for settling refugees after temporary stops in Niger.

“The UNHCR’s programme to evacuate asylum seekers and refugees from Libya is severely handicapped by the low number of resettlement pledges by European countries and the slow pace of actual resettlement of the few that are processed,” Sunderland told IPS.

The situation is complicated by turbulence across Libya, which has seen little but violence since the 2011 uprising that killed president Muammar Gaddafi and saw the nation collapse into a civil war that continues today.

The airstrike that devastated Tajoura occurred after renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar and his self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) launched an offensive in early April to seize control of Tripoli. The GNA blames the LNA for the deaths, which the LNA denies.

Elinor Raikes, a regional director for the International Rescue Committee, an aid group that operates in Libya, said that locking up migrants was not a problem only in North Africa, but part of a global anti-immigrant phenomenon.

“Arbitrary detention is not a just response to seeking safety, but countries across the world, including in Europe and the United States, are taking part in what is a deeply concerning trend,” Raikes told IPS.

“Detention has become a form of border management, and this has meant that thousands of people are intercepted at sea and on land and then detained in inadequate living conditions, often in overcrowded cells at risk of disease and infection.”

]]>http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/08/one-month-since-libyas-migrant-tragedy-detentions-continue/feed/1Rohingyas should be given citizenship or their own state: Dr Mahathir tells Myanmarhttp://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/rohingyas-given-citizenship-state-dr-mahathir-tells-myanmar/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rohingyas-given-citizenship-state-dr-mahathir-tells-myanmar
http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/rohingyas-given-citizenship-state-dr-mahathir-tells-myanmar/#commentsSun, 28 Jul 2019 11:39:06 +0000The Star Onlinehttp://www.ipsnews.net/?p=162656The Rohingyas should be treated as Myanmar nationals or be given a chance to form their own state, said Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad. He said even though Malaysia generally does not wish to interfere with the internal affairs of other countries, it does so in this case due to the massacre or genocide […]

Malaysia Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad says that the Rohingya should be treated as Myanmar nationals or be given a chance to form their own state. In this photo, he speaks during the opening ceremony of the 20th Asia Oil & Gas Conference in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia on June 24, 2019. File photo: Reuters

By The Star Online, Kuala LumpurJul 28 2019 (IPS-Partners)

The Rohingyas should be treated as Myanmar nationals or be given a chance to form their own state, said Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

He said even though Malaysia generally does not wish to interfere with the internal affairs of other countries, it does so in this case due to the massacre or genocide that is happening in Myanmar.

“Myanmar, of course, at one time was made up of many different states. But the British decided to rule Myanmar as one state – and because of that, many of the tribes (were) included in the state of Burma.

“But now they should either be treated as nationals or they should be given their territory to form their own state,” he said in an interview with Turkey’s Anadolu Agency in Ankara during his four-day visit to the country. In 2017, more than 700,000 ethnic Rohingya were driven from Rakhine state following a military-led crackdown that a United Nations’ report said included mass killings and gang rapes.

Meanwhile, asked to comment on the plight of the Uighur in China, Dr Mahathir said Malaysia has always advocated for the settlement of conflicts through negotiation, arbitration or court of law.

“We should tell China (to) please treat these people as citizens. The fact that they have a different religion should not influence the treatment towards them. When you resort to violence, then it’s very difficult to find a good conclusion because there has been no case where violence has achieved the objective,” he said.

Meanwhile, on Turkey’s fight against the Fetullah Terrorist Organisation (FETO) both inside and outside the country, Dr Mahathir said Malaysia does not support insurrection in any country.

“It is our policy not to be used as a base for action taken against other countries. It is for that reason that when we find that there are some attempts to make use of Malaysia as a base for dissent against the Turkish government, we have taken action to close these (FETO-linked) schools” he said.

On 22 July 2019, Kenneth Roth published an article in Publico, Lisbon, entitled: “UN Chief Guterres has disappointed on Human Rights”.

This essay lampooning Antonio Guterres is not a voice “against the tide” but very much mainstream – and demonstrably skewed. Major NGOs headquartered in rich advanced countries and enjoying generous funding from the Establishment may not always think “out of the box” and are as likely, as are the interest groups which support them, to politicize human rights and therefore to disappoint rights holders in smaller or weaker countries.

While they do contribute to exposing situations of human rights violations worldwide , they are not exempt from biases which reflect the structure of their central governing bodies or the cultural environment within which they operate. They cannot arrogate to themselves the sole legitimacy to speak in the name of the civil society of many countries , and when they claim to do so, they may disappoint rightsholders, particularly in the developing countries, whose priorities are frequently different from theirs.

Kenneth Roth’s bludgeoning of the UN Secretary General in this regard is yet another expression of grandstanding and even of a measure of arrogance. HRW’s criticism of China, Russia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, would be more persuasive if the organisation addressed with the same intensity the egregious violations of human rights in many other countries

Sober analysis and stocktaking are necessary to determine whether and to what extent the priorities and agendas of NGOs’s like HRW are set by the overall interests of the established power-structures and multiple elites in many countries. Kenneth Roth’s article expressing disappointment at the human rights performance of Secretary General Antonio Guterres fails to identify the root causes of human rights violations.

His admonitions have little or no preventative value, and do not formulate constructive recommendations such as, for instance, the provision of advisory services and technical assistance to many countries that need it and have asked for it.

HRW’s “naming and shaming” strategy has been inconclusive at best because “naming and shaming” depends on the authority of the “namer” and the impartiality of the methodology. Kenneth Roth’s bludgeoning of the UN Secretary General in this regard is yet another expression of grandstanding and even of a measure of arrogance. HRW’s criticism of China, Russia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, would be more persuasive if the organisation addressed with the same intensity the egregious violations of human rights in many other countries.

For instance, Mr. Roth does not mention the denial of the right of self-determination to millions of people, the retrogression in the enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights (prohibited by the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights), the looting of natural resources and degradation of the environment by transnational corporations and their neocolonial schemes, the impunity enjoyed by politicians who engage in aggressive wars and by paramilitaries and private security companies, the devastating human rights impact of blockades by source countries and economic sanctions on the populations of Gaza, Syria, Iran and Venezuela, which have caused and continue to cause tens of thousands of deaths.

The politicization or as we now witness with concern, the“weaponization” of human rights is taking the world on a slippery slope. When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)was adopted in 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt, Charles Malik, René Cassin and others spoke of human dignity and the inalienable rights of human beings, but article 29 of UDHR also reminded us that “everyone has duties to the community”.

Indeed, what is most necessary is global education in human rights, including the human right to peace, education in empathy and solidarity with others – compassion, not predatory competition in “the human rights industry” on a “holier than thou” ticket.

Meanwhile, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres should not be expected to act as a Human Rights NGO. This high office is not that of an unaccountable activist. It is neither that of a general that can blast any state at will nor is it a secretary that has to be subservient to the prevailing powers that be.

That high official must recognize the reality of the power balance that he cannot fundamentally alter but must strive with obduracy and at times courage to stretch the international community towards more compliance with the purposes and principles of the United Nations. Most importantly this means the promotion of peace through conflict-prevention, good offices, impartial mediation, disarmament and yes, human rights. When all diplomacy fails and only then may “naming and shaming” become an option. But it is a default option and a sign of diplomatic failure.

In the experience of both of us as Special Rapporteurs of the Human Rights Council, we have delivered on our mandates, not by openly challenging the authority of states or claiming to teach them lessons in human rights but by giving quiet diplomacy a chance .

This is how one of us together with another Independent Expert facilitated a lifting of the sanctions on Sudan and this is how we are again currently engaging with protagonists of other conflicts. We have succeeded in confidence-building and contributed to the release of detainees. Persevering and discrete advocacy bears fruit.

We want a SG that puts values above politics in human rights matters and this is, in our opinion, what Guterres is doing. We have a Secretary General that can speak for truth and can at least listen to the narratives of the smaller and weaker states who have no access to the world media and whose action is distorted by biased reporting.

Of course the murder of Khashoggi is a tragedy because beyond the tragic loss of a human life, it is the freedom of expression that is targeted. But Kenneth Roth does not mention the thousands of migrants whose lives end in the liquid graves of the oceans because saving them at sea is becoming a criminal offence in some « enlightened » nations.

Are there different values attached to life according to the « exploitability » of its loss for political aims? We do not think that the Secretary General should go down along this road, even if this may cause disappointment in some quarters.

We would be really concerned if the Secretary general were to follow the path of selective indignation advocated implicitly by Mr Roth, because he would lose the moral leadership that we all, people of good will, can identify with across the world. THAT would be a major disappointment.

We welcome in Antonio Guterres a Secretary General who does not hesitate to call a spade a spade, a SG who promotes peace and does not stoke conflict, who challenges unilateral economic sanctions, who supports the Right to Development1 and places the Secretariat of the United Nations in its service. We welcome a SG who, together with the new UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, are engaging all of humanity in the noble task – day by day – of implementing civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights in larger freedom – and in good faith.

]]>http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/human-rights-watch-disappoints-human-rights/feed/0Horn of Africa Drought Threatens Re-run of Famines Pasthttp://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/horn-africa-drought-threatens-re-run-famines-past/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=horn-africa-drought-threatens-re-run-famines-past
http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/horn-africa-drought-threatens-re-run-famines-past/#respondThu, 25 Jul 2019 09:44:56 +0000James Reinlhttp://www.ipsnews.net/?p=162568Humanitarian groups and the United Nations are warning of another drought in the Horn of Africa, threatening a repeat of the deadly dry spell and famine that claimed lives in Somalia and its neighbours eight years ago. The British charity Oxfam said Thursday that more than 15 million people across drought-stricken parts of Ethiopia, Kenya […]

United Nations are warning of another drought in the Horn of Africa. Eight years ago famine left more than 260,000 dead. Pictured here is a child from drought-stricken southern Somalia who survived the long journey to an aid camp in the Somali capital Mogadishu during the 2011 famine. Credit: Abdurrahman Warsameh/IPS

By James ReinlUNITED NATIONS, Jul 25 2019 (IPS)

Humanitarian groups and the United Nations are warning of another drought in the Horn of Africa, threatening a repeat of the deadly dry spell and famine that claimed lives in Somalia and its neighbours eight years ago.

The British charity Oxfam said Thursday that more than 15 million people across drought-stricken parts of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia now needed handouts and warned of a hefty death toll unless donors stumped up cash fast.

“We cannot wait until images of malnourished people and dead animals fill our television screens. We need to act now to avert disaster,” said Lydia Zigomo, Oxfam’s regional director for the Horn of Africa.

According to an Oxfam report, donors were quick to dig into the pockets for a drought in 2017, helping to stave off a famine that could have been as deadly as the 2011 dry spell that left more than 260,000 dead, and many more hungry and sick.

But while the humanitarian response was well-funded back in 2017, donor governments have not raised enough cash yet this time around, added Zigomo, a human rights lawyer from Zimbabwe.

“We learned from the collective failures of the 2011 famine that we must respond swiftly and decisively to save lives. But the international commitment to ensure that it never happens again is turning to complacency,” said Zigomo.

“Once again, it is the poorest and most vulnerable who are bearing the brunt.”

Halima Adan, Deputy Director of Save Somali Women and Children, said in the Oxfam report that the slowness of the response to the drought “mean[s] women’s burdens and vulnerability are increasing. In often hostile environments, local actors are best placed to reach those most in need, where emphasis must be on reaching women and children”.

The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR has also sounded the alarm. Somalia’s recent April-June and October-December rainy seasons were drier than expected, worsening an arid spell that was already hitting farmers and herders across the turbulent country.

Some 5.4 million Somalis were expected to be facing food shortages by September, and 2.2 million of them would need “immediate emergency assistance” UNHCR spokesperson Babar Baloch warned last month.

Donors had only handed over one fifth of the 711 million dollars that was requested in an appeal in May, added Baloch.

“The latest drought comes just as the country was starting to recover from a drought in 2016 to 2017 that led to the displacement inside Somalia of over a million people,” Baloch told reporters in Geneva.

“Many remain in a protracted state of displacement.”

Last month, the European Union launched a 3.2 million euro scheme to manage water sources and agriculture and lessen the impact of drought, in cooperation with officials in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, and the northern breakaway region of Somaliland.

“Water and land are critical resources for the Somali economy and people’s livelihoods but are also extremely vulnerable to natural disasters and climate change,” said EU diplomat Hjordis D’Agostino Ogendo.

“While access to water needs to increase, needed infrastructures are to be designed and managed in a sustainable way.”

Somalia has seen little but drought, famine and conflict since dictator Siad Barre was toppled in 1991. The country’s weak, U.N.-backed government struggles to assert control over poor, rural areas under the Islamist militant group al Shabaab.

Droughts are getting worse globally, according to the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). By 2025, some 1.8 billion people will experience serious water shortages, and two thirds of the world will be “water-stressed”.

Though droughts are complex and develop slowly, they cause more deaths than cyclones, earthquakes and other types of natural disaster, the UNCCD warns. By 2045, droughts will have forced as many as 135 million people from their homes.

“With climate change amplifying the frequency and intensity of sudden disasters … and contributing to more gradual environmental phenomena, such as drought and rising sea levels, it is expected to drive even more displacement in the future,” added Baloch.

But U.N. experts say there is hope. By managing water sources, forests, livestock and farming, soil erosion can be reduced and degraded land can be revived, a process that could also help tackle climate change.

]]>http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/horn-africa-drought-threatens-re-run-famines-past/feed/0The Precipitous Barbarisation of Our Timeshttp://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/precipitous-barbarisation-times/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=precipitous-barbarisation-times
http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/precipitous-barbarisation-times/#commentsTue, 23 Jul 2019 10:51:51 +0000Roberto Saviohttp://www.ipsnews.net/?p=162526When all is said and done, it appears that Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher who had a dire vision of man, was not totally wrong. From the frivolous to the serious, in just a week we have had four items of news which would not happen in a normal world. An English porn […]

When all is said and done, it appears that Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century English philosopher who had a dire vision of man, was not totally wrong.

From the frivolous to the serious, in just a week we have had four items of news which would not happen in a normal world. An English porn beauty with 86,000 followers on social media has put bottles of the water she bathes in on sale at 30 pounds a bottle and has sold several thousand bottles.

Roberto Savio

A survey in Brazil found out that 7% of citizens believe that the earth is flat (40 percent of American schools teach that the world was created in a week, according to the Bible, so there cannot be ancient civilisations) Another survey, this time of members of the British Tory party, who seem likely to elect Boris Johnson as prime minister (not exactly a triumph of reason) are so in favour of a “hard” Brexit that they do not care if this means the exit of Scotland and the end of the United Kingdom. Finally, in order to win election, US president Donald Trump has made racism one of his banners and, in a country of immigrants, this has given him an increase of 5 points in opinion polls.

There are so many signs of barbarisation that they would fill a book… and, as Euripides famously wrote: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

It is not a popular task, but we have to look at the reality and observe that, in the most scientifically and technologically developed period of history, we are living in times of precipitous barbarisation.

Social inequality has become the basis for the new economy. People have now lowered their expectations and are prepared to work part-time in a precarious job, where young people (according to the International Labour Organisation) can hope for a retirement pension of 600 euro a month. This has been accepted by the political system. We even have a study from Spain according to which, in the present housing market, nearly 87% of people need 90% of their salary just to rent a house.

Today, for many, a salary means survival, not a dignified life. The new economy has developed the so-called gig economy: you work to distribute food, but you are a co-entrepreneur without any of the rights of an employee, for an amount that will never allow you to marry. Children have grown accustomed to look at phenomena such as poverty or war as natural. And now politics are not based on ideas but on how you can successfully exploit the guts of the people, waving banners against immigrants (when we are witnessing a rapid fall in the birth rate) and splintering countries between ”We” who represent the people and “You” enemy of the country. The United States is the best example, where Republicans consider Democrats enemies of the United States. And this brings us to a central question: have Trump, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and company not been elected democratically? And they are the symptom or the cause of the “populocracy” which is replacing democracy?

It is not possible to offer a sociological or historical study here. Let us just use a bite: we have gone from the Gutenberg era into a new era – the Zuckerberg era.

Those who greeted the arrival of the Internet with enthusiasm also did so because it would democratise communication and therefore bring about greater participation. The hope was to see a world where horizontal communication would replace the vertical system of information which Gutenberg made possible. Information was, in fact, a support for states and business that used it to reach citizens, who had no recourse to feedback. With Internet, people could now speak directly throughout the world and the propaganda which accompanied its arrival was not considered relevant: it is not important to know, it is important to know where to find It. Well, we have all the statistics on how Internet has affected the general level of culture and dialogue.

The attention span of people has declined dramatically. The majority of Internet users do not stay on an item more than 15 seconds. In the last five years, book volumes have been shortened by 29 pages. Today, articles longer than 650 words are not accepted by columnists’ services. The last meeting of editors of international news agencies decided to lower the level of news from the level of 22 years to that of 17 years. In Europe, the percentage of people who buy at least one book a year now stands at 22% (in the United States it is now 10.5%). According to a recent study in Italy, only 40% of the population is able to read and understand a book. In the same country, 13% of libraries have closed in the last ten years. A very popular transmission in Spain was ”59 seconds” which saw a number of people debate round a table; at the 59th seconds their microphones would disappear. Today, the dream of a TV interviewer is that the person interviewed will give a shorter answer than the question. Newspapers are for people over forty. And there is a unanimous complaint about the level of students entering the university: not all are free from mistakes of orthography and syntax. And the list could continue practically ad infinitum.

The problem of barbarisation has major relevance for political participation. The Gutenberg generations were accustomed to dialogue and discussion. Today, 83% of Internet users (80% under the age of 21), do so only in the virtual world they carved out for themselves. People of Group A gather only with people of Group A. If they come across somebody from Group B, they insult each other. Politicians have been able to adjust rapidly to the system. The best example is Trump. All US newspapers together have a circulation of 60 million copies (ten million those of quality, both conservative and progressive). Trump has 60 million followers who take Trump’s tweets as information. The do not buy newspapers, and if they watch TV it is Fox, which is Trump’s amplifier. No wonder that over 80% of Trump’s voters would vote for him again. And the media, which have lost the ability to offer analysis and cover processes, not just events, take the easy path. Let us follow famous people and make the famous more famous. Analytical journalism is disappearing. In the United States it exists thanks to grants … in every European country, there are few quality papers left, and the largest circulation goes to tabloids which spare their readers the effort of thinking. The Daily Mirror in Britain and Bild in Germany are the best examples.

Internet has made everybody a communicator. This is a fantastic achievement. But in this increasing barbarisation, people also use the Internet for transmitting false information, stories based on fantasy, without any of the quality controls that the media world used to have. And artificial intelligence has been taking over, creating many false accounts, which now interfere in the electoral process, as was proven in the last US elections. We have to add to this that the algorithms used by the owners of the Internet aim to trap the attention of users in order to keep them as much as possible. This month, El Pais published a long study entitled “The toxic effects of YouTube”, where it shows how its algorithms push the viewer to items that are of fantasy, pseudoscientific and of great attraction.

This is due to the fact that the owners have become fabulously rich by transforming citizens into consumers. They find out our identity, and they sell it to companies for their marketing, and also for elections. Those owners have unprecedented wealth, never achieved in the real world: not only in that of production, but even in the world of finance, which has become a casino with no control. The entire world of production of services and goods, man-made, is now close to a trillion dollars a day; that same day, financial flows reach 40 trillion dollars. Jeff Bezos ‘s divorce gave his wife 38 billion dollars. That is equal to the annual average income of 20,000 dollars of 19 million people. No wonder that 80 individuals now possess the same wealth as 2.3 billion people (in 2008, they were 1,200 individuals).

According to historians, greed and fear are great engines of change in history. That was also true in the Gutenberg era. But now, they have triggered a combination of both in a short period of time. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the doctrine of liberal globalisation arrived with such strength that Margaret Thatcher (who with Ronald Reagan ushered in the new vision of individual profits and elimination of social goods) famously talked of TINA: There Is No Alternative.

The entire political system, including Social Democrats, accepted riding a system of values based on greed and unfettered competition at individual level, at state level and at international level. It took twenty years to understand that the poor have become poorer, and the rich richer, and that states have lost much of their sovereignty to multinational corporations and the world of finance. It is worth noting that, in 2009, in order to save a corrupt and inefficient financial system, the world spent 12 trillion dollars (the United States alone, 4 trillion). Since that rescue, banks have paid the impressive amount of 800 billion dollars in penalties for illicit activities.

The financial crisis of 2009 has triggered a wave of fear. Let us not forget that until 2009, there were no sovereignist, populist, xenophobic parties anywhere, except for Le Pen in France. Soon old traps such as “in name of the nation” and “the defence of religion” were resurrected by politicians able to ride fear. A new scapegoat – immigrants – was found and populocrats are now undermining democracy everywhere.

Populocracy is the new wave. Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi ushered in a new language, and that language has now been updated by Salvini, Trump and so on. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are the new medium and now the medium is the message. The old elite had not found a new language.

The Zuckerberg era is an era of greed and fear. Zuckerberg is now attempting to create a global currency, the Libra, to be used by his 2.3 billion users. Until now, states were the only entities able to emit money, a symbol of the nation. Zuckerberg’s currency is based entirely on the Internet and will have no control or regulations. In case of a default, we will have a world crisis without precedent. In the Gutenberg era, this was not possible.

But who has made able Jeff Bezos to give 38 billion dollars to a former wife? Who has elected Trump and Salvini and company, who speak on behalf of the nation and the people, and turn those who do not agree into enemies of the nation and the people, creating an unprecedented polarisation, accompanied by an orgy of revolt against science and knowledge, which have supported the elite, and must now be put aside for the good of people.

This process of barbarisation should not obscure an old proverb: every country has the government it deserves. It is called democracy. However, the traditional elite has no code of communication with the new era. The answer will come from citizen mobilization.

A young Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, has done more with her stubbornness to raise awareness about impending climate change than the entire political system. Even Trump (albeit for electoral reasons) has now declared that climate change is important.

Today, there many “points of light“ appearing in the world. The elections in Istanbul are a good example, as are the mobilisation in Hong Kong, Sudan and Nicaragua, among many others. Let us hope we will reach a point where people will take the reins of the process and awake the world from the precipitous course of barbarisation. Even Thomas Hobbes concluded that humankind will always, soon or later, find the right path, and give itself good governance. He thought that an elite would always be able to lead the masses.

Well, elites are now the Greta Thunbergs of the world.

Publisher of OtherNews, Italian-Argentine Roberto Savio is an economist, journalist, communication expert, political commentator, activist for social and climate justice and advocate of an anti neoliberal global governance. Director for international relations of the European Center for Peace and Development.. He is co-founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency and its President Emeritus.

]]>http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/precipitous-barbarisation-times/feed/1Treaty Violators Make Mockery of Refugee Conventionhttp://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/treaty-violators-make-mockery-refugee-convention/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=treaty-violators-make-mockery-refugee-convention
http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/treaty-violators-make-mockery-refugee-convention/#respondTue, 23 Jul 2019 10:18:25 +0000Thalif Deenhttp://www.ipsnews.net/?p=162522With the rise of rightwing nationalism, primarily in the Western world, an increasingly large number of countries are not only abandoning multilateralism but also violating international treaties and conventions signed and ratified in a bygone era. The most blatant is the violation of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which has been ratified by 145 State parties, […]

With the rise of rightwing nationalism, primarily in the Western world, an increasingly large number of countries are not only abandoning multilateralism but also violating international treaties and conventions signed and ratified in a bygone era.

The most blatant is the violation of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which has been ratified by 145 State parties, and which also defines the term “refugee” while outlining the rights of the displaced, as well as the legal obligations of states to protect them.

According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the core principle of the Convention is non-refoulement, which asserts that a refugee should not be returned to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom. This is now considered a rule of customary international law.

But several countries, including the US, Australia, France, Italy and Hungary, are flouting the Convention because they have either barred or severely restricted the inflow of refugees—and also penalized those who have assisted refugees (as in the US and Italy).

Categorized mostly as “political refugees”, they originate largely from conflict-ridden countries such as Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, South Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Myanmar and Venezuela, among others.

In an interview with IPS, Marco Funk, Policy Officer at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung’s (FES) European Union (EU) Office, told IPS the context of today’s refugee situation is quite different from what it was in the aftermath of World War II, when the 1951 Convention was signed.

The original Convention itself was actually limited in scope to Europeans – this geographical limitation was only lifted by an additional protocol in 1967, which some countries did not implement. Turkey is a notable example, he said.

“Many other countries around the world, especially wealthy ones, have made it increasingly difficult for refugees to seek international protection and thus either indirectly or in some cases directly violate the convention they have signed and ratified”, he pointed out.

Racism certainly is a factor, but so is the pervasive fear of negative effects on destination countries’ economies and their security, said Funk, who is responsible for the FES’s Brussels-based activities related to EU migration and home affairs.

He said the significant increase in legal migration to developed countries since the 1950s also plays a role.

Attempts to restrict migration can be seen not only in Europe, the US and Australia, he said, but also in East Asia and even some parts of the developing world.

“Wherever there is displacement, there is usually also a counter-strategy of containment by countries of destination”.

“The international community should respond by drawing attention to the rights outlined in the Refugee Convention and violations of them where they occur, but that is not enough”, said Funk, who previously worked as a Policy Analyst for the European Policy Centre, where he focused on EU migration and asylum policy.

He argued that more effort should be put into highlighting and addressing the root causes of displacement, and using other relevant international agreements to their fullest extent in order to mitigate the drivers of forced migration.

At the same time, legal channels of migration should also be expanded, he noted.

In two controversial cases recently, the Italian government placed under house arrest (but later freed) the captain of a ship carrying rescued migrants on the Mediterranean Sea.

UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters July1: “Sea rescue is a long standing humanitarian imperative. It’s also an obligation under international law”.

“No vessel or shipmaster should be at the risk of fine coming to the aid of boats in distress where loss of life be imminent. That’s a question… that’s an issue of principle,” he added.

In the US, Scott Warren, a volunteer for the non-profit humanitarian organization, ‘No More Deaths’, faced felony charges in a court in Arizona because he provided food and water for a pair of migrants who were found hungry and dehydrated in the desert — and fleeing from Central America.

In the initial hearing last June, the jury was dismissed because they could not agree on the charges.

Meanwhile, the UNHCR said on July 1 that more than 1.4 million refugees residing in over 60 refugee hosting countries will be in need of resettlement next year, according to data presented at an annual resettlement forum in Geneva.

The report, titled “Projected Global Resettlement Needs 2020”, said those most at risk and in need of resettlement include Syrian refugees (40 per cent); South Sudanese refugees (14 per cent of the total) and refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (11 per cent of the total).

Asked for a UN perspective on the violations of the 1951 Convention, Dr Palitha Kohona, the former Chief of the UN Treaty Section, told IPS one has to remember the background to that convention.

In 1951, the refugees were war displaced Europeans, almost all Christian. Other Europeans poured out their milk of human kindness in abundance to these displaced.”

Today, he said, “the refugees in Europe are slightly tinted Muslims, and the fountain of charity has inexplicably dried up”.

“Where a country is a party to the Convention and a refugee meets its requirements, the country concerned is obliged to extend its umbrella of protection,” said Dr Kohona, a former Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the UN.

“Failure to comply could result in the other state parties taking a dim view. However, such dim views do not hurt much and tend to be forgotten quickly,” he added.

]]>http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/treaty-violators-make-mockery-refugee-convention/feed/0Desperation and Fear on the Mexican Borderhttp://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/desperation-and-fear-on-the-mexican-border/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=desperation-and-fear-on-the-mexican-border
http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/desperation-and-fear-on-the-mexican-border/#commentsThu, 18 Jul 2019 09:30:03 +0000Ariana Sawyerhttp://www.ipsnews.net/?p=162470Ariana Sawyer is with the US program at Human Rights Watch

On the 2,000-mile journey from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, to the US-Mexico border, the 20-year-old asylum seeker and her 16-year-old brother took turns sleeping every time they managed to catch a ride or get on a bus. She told me they kept each other safe that way.

The asylum seeker – I’ll call her Gloria because she was afraid to have her real name published – said she fled Honduras with her little brother after a member of a gang there stalked and threatened to kill her for refusing to be his girlfriend.

When the siblings turned themselves in to US Border Patrol near El Paso, Texas, in mid-April, agents separated them.

“Where are you taking him?” she asked.

The US government is failing in its responsibilities toward asylum seekers by sending them to Ciudad Juarez and elsewhere in Mexico, where meaningful oversight is impossible.

“He’s going to a better place than you,” she said an agent replied. But as we have found, Gloria’s brother, like other children in Border Patrol detention, certainly was not going to a good place.

Gloria said she spent six days in Customs and Border Protection custody without sunlight in an overcrowded cell with no shower or ready access to water. She was then placed in the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) or “Remain in Mexico” program and sent alone to Mexico. She is expected to wait there for the duration of her asylum case, which could take months or years. She will be allowed to travel to the US only to attend immigration court hearings.

When I interviewed her in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in May, she hadn’t heard from her brother in weeks. She seemed more worried about him than anything else, but her own situation was dire.

Like the other asylum seekers we interviewed about the cruel and chaotic MPP program, Gloria found it hard enough to survive, let alone pursue her asylum case.

The shelter where she spoke to me has a limit on the number of days she can stay. Shelter operators explained they don’t want to kick vulnerable people out, but they feel they must give priority to those US authorities have most recently sent to Mexico, since they’re the most disoriented.

One shelter operator broke down and cried when we asked why one family was told that day would be their last.

Asylum seekers in need of shelter outnumber available beds in Ciudad Juarez 11 to 1, though one Mexican official told me that 20 to 30 percent of those waiting had already left with plans to try to cross the border between the ports of entry, probably in more remote, dangerous areas. Meanwhile, many of those in the program say they have family in the US to whom they could be released.

Compared to some of the most recent rounds of asylum seekers sent to Mexico whose preliminary immigration court hearings were scheduled for the summer of 2020, Gloria is somewhat better off. Her first hearing is in August.

As long as she was allowed to stay at the shelter, she said, she was avoiding going outdoors. Mexico is experiencing record levels of murders – the highest number of intentional homicides since the country began keeping track in the late 90s – which have hit Ciudad Juarez and other Mexican border towns particularly hard, and migrant women there are especially vulnerable, US federal asylum officers have said.

“I know that in any moment something could happen to me,” Gloria said.

We initially decided to visit Ciudad Juarez after migrant rights advocates expressed the need to shine a light there, describing the city as a “black hole” to which asylum seekers were being sent – out of sight, out of mind.

And when one Congresswoman recently sent staff members to Ciudad Juarez to monitor the program, a Customs and Border Patrol official leaked some forms her office sent the government agency containing sensitive information about individual asylum seekers and accused her of trying to undermine the Border Patrol.

The US government is failing in its responsibilities toward asylum seekers by sending them to Ciudad Juarez and elsewhere in Mexico, where meaningful oversight is impossible. But those concerned about this mistreatment can do their part to end it. They can call on their members of Congress to end the funding for the program, oppose the separation of families, strengthen the asylum system, and pursue alternatives to detention.

Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his daughter, Valeria, reportedly died trying to swim across the Rio Grande because they were disheartened by the barriers to asylum put up by the Trump administration at ports of entry.

]]>http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/desperation-and-fear-on-the-mexican-border/feed/1The Geneva Centre issues publication on enhancing access to justice for workers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE)http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/geneva-centre-issues-publication-enhancing-access-justice-workers-united-arab-emirates-uae/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=geneva-centre-issues-publication-enhancing-access-justice-workers-united-arab-emirates-uae
http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/geneva-centre-issues-publication-enhancing-access-justice-workers-united-arab-emirates-uae/#respondWed, 17 Jul 2019 10:36:53 +0000Geneva Centrehttp://www.ipsnews.net/?p=162464A new publication entitled “Improving access to justice for workers: The case of the UAE” has been published by the Geneva Centre for Human Rights Advancement and Global Dialogue. The publication is an outcome of a panel discussion held on 20 March 2018 at Palais des Nations in Geneva addressing the same subject. The debate […]

A new publication entitled “Improving access to justice for workers: The case of the UAE” has been published by the Geneva Centre for Human Rights Advancement and Global Dialogue. The publication is an outcome of a panel discussion held on 20 March 2018 at Palais des Nations in Geneva addressing the same subject. The debate was jointly organized by the Geneva Centre, the European Public Law Organization (EPLO) and the Permanent Mission of the United Arab Emirates to the United Nations Office in Geneva (UNOG).

The aim of the publication is to review the progress achieved in the UAE to enhance access to justice for workers and to identify areas of possible improvement. The review was intended to assess the most innovative features of labour reforms and their possible replication in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. UAE was chosen as a case study for this review in view of the fact that the country has the highest proportion of international migrants in the world and that the country has recently implemented numerous innovative measures to enhance access to justice for migrant workers.

The first part of the publication summarizes the panel proceedings of the statements provided by labour migration specialists. During the debate, it was highlighted that migrant workers bring a substantial contribution to the host economy, as the UAE is dependent on access to labour to maintain economic growth and development, since domestic labour supply is insufficient to meet national demand. The speakers also offered constructive recommendations to the UAE regarding the adoption of policies and measures aimed at ameliorating access to justice for foreign workers.

The second part of the publication includes an intellectual think piece on the process of reform, which has been initiated in the UAE with respect to foreign labour. In this connection, it was argued that the UAE has made remarkable efforts to improve the overall labour conditions of foreign labour and to enhance legal avenues to settle labour-related disputes. For instance, the UAE government has established a mobile court system, the first of its kind worldwide, to address lawsuits related to labour laws and to provide legal services. In 2017, the UAE created a One-Day Court System to settle labour disputes for litigation claims amounting to up to USD 5,500. These initiatives are telling examples of recent action taken by UAE authorities to enhance access to justice for workers.

The Geneva Centre aims to carry out a similar evaluation process of internal labour legislation to enhance access to justice for foreign workers in other countries of the GCC experiencing large-scale migration.

Interested Permanent Missions accredited to UN in Geneva and other stakeholders are invited to pick-up copies of this brochure, which is at their disposal at the premises of the Geneva Centre, located at:

]]>http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/geneva-centre-issues-publication-enhancing-access-justice-workers-united-arab-emirates-uae/feed/0Migrants, Militias & the Mediterranean Seahttp://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/migrants-militias-mediterranean-sea/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=migrants-militias-mediterranean-sea
http://www.ipsnews.net/2019/07/migrants-militias-mediterranean-sea/#respondThu, 11 Jul 2019 11:08:51 +0000Marco Funkhttp://www.ipsnews.net/?p=162389Marco Funk is a Policy Officer at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung EU Office, where he is responsible for the foundation’s Brussels-based activities related to EU migration and home affairs. He previously worked as a Policy Analyst for the European Policy Centre, where he focused on EU migration and asylum policy.

When the Italian police recently arrested Carola Rackete, captain of the Sea-Watch 3 search and rescue vessel, the Central Mediterranean Sea suddenly entered the international limelight once again.

Media coverage of the most dangerous migration route in the world had previously been quite muted everywhere except Italy, where for months Interior Minister Matteo Salvini used every opportunity to publicly lambast the German NGO’s activities – despite low numbers of arrivals.

In fact, Captain Rackete became Salvini’s (and increasingly his voters’) enemy of choice well before her arrest. At the same time, she became a hero to those who support rescuing migrants at sea.

Yet despite the uproar, the row about NGO rescue ships represents only a small part of the complex geopolitical puzzle that drives irregular migration along this route. Carola Rackete’s arrest will have a very limited impact on the overall situation.

In order to truly understand what’s going on in the Central Mediterranean, one must retrace migrants’ steps all the way back to their countries of origin – often in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East or even South Asia.

Some are refugees as defined by the 1951 Refugee Convention, others are not, but practically all of them have good reasons to leave their homes. This mixed migration flow typically crosses several countries before entering Libya, the main gateway to Europe.

EU efforts in Libya since the fall of Gaddafi have focused heavily on curbing migration to Europe. Some activities bend or even violate international law to keep migrants at bay.

African migrants crossing the Sahara Desert face dangers as severe as those at sea, with an uncounted death toll possibly far greater than that in the Mediterranean. Once migrants enter Libya, they find themselves in a comparatively wealthy country – Libya holds Africa’s largest oil reserves.

However, it is also a war-torn country in political disarray since the fall of ex-dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

Some long-term residents from North Africa or the Middle East are quite happy to stay in Libya, while more recent arrivals from sub-Saharan countries often face severe discrimination, exploitation and abuse.

As Libya never signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, refugees have no legal status in the country and cannot seek international protection there. In fact, undocumented migrants in Libya can be arrested and imprisoned at any time.

Local militias, acting as police in areas they control, also run detention centres where they extort money from migrants or sell those who cannot pay to smugglers and human traffickers.

Some of these same militia members are on government payrolls and are supported directly or indirectly by EU missions seeking to train and equip border police and coast guard officials.

EU efforts in Libya since the fall of Gaddafi have focused heavily on curbing migration to Europe. Some activities bend or even violate international law to keep migrants at bay.

But there’s no way to address the issue effectively without settling the ongoing power struggle between the Government of National Accord (GNA) headed by Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj and rival Khalifa Haftar, commander of the Libyan National Army (LNA), based in the east of the country.

While the internationally recognised GNA is officially supported by the EU and Italy in particular, its actual control of Libyan territory is limited to Tripoli and some areas of Western Libya controlled by allied militias.

Meanwhile, France backs the LNA, which controls the east and parts of the south of the country either directly or by proxy through local militias. Haftar launched an attack on Tripoli in April 2019, just days before a planned national conference to organise presidential and parliamentary elections to help solve the political crisis in Libya.

The conflict is currently at a stalemate, with Haftar’s forces fighting against the GNA on the outskirts of Tripoli.

The EU needs a common strategy

The EU’s split position isn’t just awkward but indeed counterproductive in finding a solution to the conflict, and by extension the migratory situation as well. Italy and France should agree on a common strategy and facilitate a peace deal between the GNA and the LNA by using their respective influence on each side of the conflict.

The EU could then step up its capacity building work, help professionalise Libya’s security sector, strengthen civil society and invest in projects that unlock Libya’s economic potential. Stability and prosperity in Libya would significantly reduce migratory pressure to Europe by making it safer and more attractive as a destination country for labour migrants – as it was before the revolution.

As the European Parliament and the European Commission start their new terms this year, migration should be back at the top of their agendas.

Stabilising Libya will certainly take time and may not even be possible because the conflict is so complex and involves a multitude of internal and external non-EU actors. The EU must therefore simultaneously work towards a sustainable search and rescue, reception and relocation mechanism for those who manage to leave Libya.

Italy’s decision to close its ports and criminalise NGOs attempting to bring rescued migrants to shore is certainly deplorable. Yet it’s also understandable given the lack of solidarity other EU member states have demonstrated long before Salvini was elected to government.

As a result, Malta now feels the cold shoulder of northern and eastern European indifference as it receives more and more arrivals diverted from Italy. The current practice of ad-hoc, case-by-case relocations for each boatload of migrants rejected by the Italian authorities is simply not sustainable.

Solving the question of asylum seeker relocation within the EU may even be more difficult than achieving peace in Libya, as the never-ending standstill in negotiations between the European Parliament and Council on the reform of the Dublin Regulation demonstrates.

But it must be done. There’s no other way to handle the arrival of migrants seeking asylum in Europe. The alternative is a political backlash in frontline member states that threatens the entire EU project.

As the European Parliament and the European Commission start their new terms this year, migration should be back at the top of their agendas. However, in contrast to the last terms, they should approach irregular migration through the Central Mediterranean not as an isolated issue, but rather as one element in an interlinked set of challenges requiring integrated policy responses.

Only then does the EU stand a chance at finding sustainable solutions that can withstand the inevitable migratory pressure facing Europe in the future.

This article first appeared in International Politics and Society published by the International Political Analysis Unit of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Hiroshimastrasse 28, D-10785 Berlin.

Marco Funk is a Policy Officer at the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung EU Office, where he is responsible for the foundation’s Brussels-based activities related to EU migration and home affairs. He previously worked as a Policy Analyst for the European Policy Centre, where he focused on EU migration and asylum policy.

Every year on World Population Day (July 11), UNFPA receives queries from journalists about the total number of people around the world. Numbers are indeed important because they help governments develop policies that respond to evolving needs for services such as education and health.

While global population is currently around 7.7 billion, what is perhaps more important than the numbers is the bigger story they tell–a story about sex: who has it, when they have it and under what circumstances. It is also a story about agency.

Oscar Wilde once said, “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.” Whether a woman or teenage girl has the power to decide about sexual relations will have a profound impact on her life.

UNFPA statistics from 51 countries show that only three in five married women make their own decisions about intimacy with their partner, use of contraception, and their healthcare. In some of the least developed countries, it is only 1 in 14 women who have such power.

Lack of agency, or power, in these areas can translate into forced sex, unintended pregnancy, teenage pregnancy, and families that are larger than a woman wants. And with these consequences can come long-term harm to a woman’s health and the denial of her rights.

This is what a lack of agency meant for one young woman in Burundi: Charlotte was 17 when she was forced to marry and leave school, closing out opportunities for higher education, employment and economic independence.

Her husband deserted her after she became pregnant, and Charlotte was left to manage serious complications during delivery by herself. In the end, she lost her baby and fell into a coma for four days.

Unfortunately, she developed an obstetric fistula, a normally preventable condition, that caused urinary and fecal incontinence. Charlotte’s father then forced her to live in a brick hole in their backyard for nine years because he couldn’t bear the stench.

Thanks to UNFPA, Charlotte finally got the surgery she needed, but she will never get back the nine years she lost. A lack of agency early in life kicked off a calamitous chain of events that robbed her of her dignity and health and derailed her future.

Lack of agency in sex is often linked to child marriage. Every day, 33,000 girls become brides against their will and in violation of their rights. About 95 per cent of teenage births occur in developing countries, and 9 in 10 of these births occur within a marriage or union.

Millions of girls around the world pay a high price every day due to lack of access to comprehensive sexuality education and taboos around speaking openly about sexual and reproductive health.

There are 214 million women in developing countries who want to prevent a pregnancy but are not using contraception. Without family planning information and services, these women lack the power to make their own decisions about whether, when or how often to become pregnant.

And this amounts to a violation of their rights affirmed through international agreements and resolutions dating back as far as 1968.

We have ample evidence of how a lack of agency negatively impacts a woman’s health and well-being. But there is also abundant evidence of an economic impact as well.

Societies where women have the power to make decisions about the timing and spacing of pregnancies and in other aspects of their lives also tend to be more prosperous, equitable and resilient.

Twenty-five years ago, at the International Conference for Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, 179 governments recognized the importance of agency in sexual relations and promised to empower women and girls in every aspect of life to enable them to chart their own futures.

Central to the ICPD’s Programme of Action was a commitment to achieve universal sexual and reproductive health and to protect every woman’s right to make her own decisions about the timing and spacing of pregnancies.

Since then, the world has made impressive gains in bolstering agency, particularly through expanding access to contraception. Still, there are hundreds of millions of women and teenage girls who have been left behind, especially in poor, rural or marginalized communities.

We cannot accept defeat. We must take action to fulfill the commitments made at the ICPD and achieve the world we imagined: one where every pregnancy is wanted, where people choose freely whom to marry as adults, where no one is subjected to gender-based violence, and all girls are protected from violence and the harm caused by practices such as female genital mutilation–a world where agency, especially when it comes to sex, is a reality for all.

This world can be a reality, but it requires more than hope. It demands conviction, courage, partnership and dedication from us all. That’s why this November, UNFPA and the governments of Kenya and Denmark are co-convening the Nairobi Summit on ICPD25 to finish the job we started in 1994.

On this World Population Day, I call on all governments to join us in Nairobi, to look beyond the numbers, and to breathe new life into the global movement to achieve the world we imagine.

The Libyan catastrophe and the suffering of ”illegal” migrants are generally depicted as fairly recent events, though they are actually the results of a long history of greed, contempt for others and fatal shortsightedness. Like former Yugoslavia, Libya was created from a mosaic of tribal entities, subdued by colonial powers and then ruled by an iron-fisted dictator. Now, Libya is a quagmire where local and international stakeholders battle to control its natural resources. The country holds the largest oil reserves in Africa, oil and gas account for 60 percent of GDP and more than 90 percent of exports.1 This is one reason why Egypt, France, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the U.S., and many other nations are enmeshed in Libya. Furthermore, European nations try to stop mainly sub-Saharan refugees and migrants from reaching their coasts from Libya. An attempt to understand Italy´s essential role in the struggle over Libya´s oil and attempts to control unwanted immigration may help to clarify some issues related to the current situation.

On the 29th of June Sea-Watch 3 arrived in the port of Lampedusa. The ship carried 40 people who two weeks before had been rescued from an inflatable raft off the coast of Libya. After being denied disembarkation in Tripoli Sea-Watch headed for Lampedusa. The German Captain Carola Rackete´s appeals to the Italian Government to let the migrants disembark on Italian territory were met by deaf ears and she thus steered Sea-Watch dangerously close to a military patrol boat, which tried to hinder her vessel from reaching the port:

The situation was desperate. My goal was only to bring exhausted and desperate people to shore. My intention was not to put anyone in danger. I already apologised, and I reiterate my apology. They were asking me to take them back to Libya. From a legal standpoint, these were people fleeing a country at war [and] the law bars you from taking them back there.

On the 3rd of July, the Court decided that Rackete had acted out of compassion and after being ordered to return to Germany she was released. Salvini fumed:

She will return to her Germany where they would not have been so tolerant if an Italian woman had made an attempt on the life of German policemen. Italy has raised its head: we are proud to defend our country and to be different from other small European leaders who think they can still treat us as their colony.3

Italy treated like a European colony? This is doubtful, though it is a fact that Libya once was Italy´s grossing and mistreated colony and that Italy continues to be deeply involved in Lybian affairs.

While Rackete awaited her trial, Tajoura, a “migrant detention centre” east of Tripoli, housing more than 600 people, was hit by two airstrikes, leaving at least 44 dead and more than 130 severely injured. The attack was blamed on Kahilfa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA).

Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar is the Libyan-American commander of armed forces loyal to the Libyan House of Representatives.4 He served under Muammar Gaddafi and took part in the coup that in 1969 brought Gaddafi to power. In 1987, Haftar was captured during Chad´s still smoldering civil war. He was released in 1990 and for two decades lived not far from Langley, Virginia, headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). General Haftar was instrumental in the 2011 downfall of Gaddafi and has been described as Libya’s most potent warlord. During Libya´s recent conflicts he has fought with and against nearly every significant faction.5

At the moment, Haftar is openly supported by Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Egypt, and more or less clandestinely by France and Russia, with the U.S. waiting in the wings. France supports the interests of Total S.A., ranked as the world’s fourth-largest non-governmental petroleum company (after Shell, BP, and Exxon), while Russia is supporting LNA through weapon sales. Haftar´s forces are currently attacking the Government of National Accord (NAC) with its centre in Tripoli, this transition government is officially supported by the UN and particularly by Qatar and Turkey, though other forces are also present, such as Italy´s Miasit mission with 400 soldiers and 130 “land, naval and air vehicles”. Italy is the European country with the deepest Libyan ties.6 One example is ENI´s activities, an Italian multinational oil and gas corporation, the world´s 11th largest industrial company, which since 1959 has profited from Libya´s oil production.7 However, Italy´s connections with Libya runs even deeper than that.

In 1912, Italy conquered Ottoman Tripolotania and created a colony called Libya. After being defeated in World War II, Italy did in 1947 relinquish all claims to the territory. However, for more than thirty years the stream of people crossing the Mediterranean had moved in a completely different direction than it is doing now. After the Great Depression, Libya´s Italian population increased rapidly; in 1927, 26,000 Italians were living there, by 1939 they numbered 119,140, or 13 percent of the total population. Italian settlers were provided with land and infrastructure, while the local population was driven off to marginal lands, though this did not happen without fierce resistance. Italian colonial troops waged a ruthelss war against the locals, applying chemical weapons, mass executions of POWs and civilians, as well as the establishment of lethal concentration camps. It is estimated that between 1923 and 1932, 80,000 to 120,000 Libyans had been exterminated.8

When Colonel Muammar Gadaffi in 1970 became Libya´s dictator he banished the remaining 12,000 Italian citizens and had their possessions confiscated. After Gadaffi in 1973 nationalized half of the foreign oil production, the country´s GDP rose from USD 3.8 billion in 1969 to USD 24.5 billion in 1979. For a few years, Libya´s average per-capita income was above the average of Italy. Oil money was used to fund welfare programmes; house-building projects, improved healthcare, and compulsory education. However, over time Gadaffi´s erratic behaviour worsened. Any political conversation with foreigners became punishable with at least three years in prison and intents to start a ”political party” could lead to execution. Libya was furthermore supporting terrorist organizations all over the world.

In 2004, Gadaffi visited Brussels and succeeded in convincing the EU to drop sanctions imposed on Libya. Like Turkey, Libya used the plights of refugees and international migrants as a means to extract funds from the EU, which in 2010 contributed with €50 million to stop African migrants from passing through Libya into Europe, while migrants had already been used as a bargaining chip during Gadaffi´s negotiations with Italy, which in spite of recurrent grievances had maintained several of its financial and commercial ties with Libyan leaders.

In 2008, Gadaffi made a deal with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi – Italy would through annual installments of USD250 million over a 20 year period compensate Libya for hardships brought about by its colonization of the country. In exchange, Libya would curb illegal migration across the Mediterranean, an encouragement for establishing ”detention centres”, which soon became sources for slave labour and human trafficking.9 The deal was suspended in February 2011 but renewed on 7 July 2018, leading to an intensified Italian-Lybian cooperation.

After a new Italian government came into office in 2018, it refused to take in people from search-and-rescue ships active in the Mediterranean, this included rescue efforts by the EU sponsored Operation Sophia, which since 2015 had saved thousands of people from drowning. After Italy threatened to veto it, EU did on 27 March stop this endeavour. Since then, thousands more international migrants, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, have been detained in the infamous Lybian detention centres. Various reports did in 2017 estimate the number of inmates in Libyan camps to be between 10,000-20,000, at any given time. 10

The situation has become even worse after Field Marshal Haftar´s recent, massive attack on Tripoli. Both militias and ”regular” army forces tend to use ”detention centres” as ”shields” for their installations. On 3 July, right after the attack on the Tajoura camp, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, stated:

I have repeatedly called for the closure of all migrant detention centres in Libya, where UN human rights staff have documented severe overcrowding, torture, ill-treatment, forced labour, rape, and acute malnutrition, among other serious human rights violations. I also repeat my call for the release of detained migrants and refugees as a matter of urgency, and for their access to humanitarian protection, collective shelters or other safe places, well away from areas that are likely to be after been trapped in gruesome facilities.11

Libya´s current misery and the plight of refugees and international migrants languishing in its detention centres, or drown in the Mediterranean, cannot only be blamed on repression in developing countries and the inability of their governments to amend poverty and unemployment. The disaster is also caused and furthered by distortions engendered by colonization and the enduring greed of foreign stakeholders. We are all guilty of the current suffering in Libya.

1 Organization of the Pertroleum Exporting Countries (2019) Libya Facts and Figures. https://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/about_us/166.htm2Agence France-Presse (2019) “Captain defends her decision to force rescue boat into Italian port.” The Guardian, 30 June.3 Tonacci, Fabio and Alessandra Ziniti (2019) “Sea-Watch, Carola Rackete è libera: ´Commossa. Gip annula
l´arresto: ´Agì per portare in salvo i migranti´. L´ira di Salvini.” La Repubblica, 4 July.4 A UN led initiative established in 2015 a Libyan Government of National Accord (NAC). However, a House of Representatives (HoR) had already been formed after an election in 2014, to replace Libya´s General National Congress. Neither entity recognizes the other, NAC is based in Tripoli, while HoR is in Tobruk, their armies are currently fighting each other.5 Anderson, Jon Lee (2015) “The Unravelling: In a failing state, an anti-Islamist general mounts a divisive campaign” The New Yorker, February 23 and March 2.6 Orsini, Alessandro (2019) “Haftar a Roma: L´Italia non pu`lasciare a Libia scivolare verso il Medio Oriente,” Il Messagero, March 17.7https://www.eni.com/enipedia/en_IT/international-presence/africa/enis-activities-in-libya.page?lnkfrm=asknow Thirty percent ENI´s shares are owned by the Italian government.8 Historical information in this article is mainly based on Wright, John (2012) Libya: A Modern History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.9 Human smuggling from the coast of Libya is a multimillion dollar business. In 2015, the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime (GITOC) estimated profits to be between USD 255 – 323 million per year. GITOC (2015) Policy Brief. Libya: a growing hub for Criminal Economies and Terrorist Financing in the Trans-Sahara. Geneva: RHIPTO. p. 2.10 Amnesty International (2017) Libya’s Dark Web of Collusion: Abuses Against Europe-Bound Refugees and Migrants. London: Amnesty International Ltd.11https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=24535&LangID=E

Jan Lundius holds a PhD. on History of Religion from Lund University and has served as a development expert, researcher and advisor at SIDA, UNESCO, FAO and other international organisations.